Year of 2022

Just like that 2022 is over, and it’s time to review how the year went for us in The House and the Variant World...

- Our lichess team continued to grow, and we broke the magical barrier of 10,000 members in November. Thank you everyone for being part of the team! <3
- We extended our victorious march in the Lichess Bundesliga (“BL”). After winning 2020 and 2021 seasons, we managed to complete the hat-trick and took home the 2022 trophy. The hunt for the 2023 cup has already begun as season’s first BL round was played yesterday.
- In the OTB chess scene, both @gsvc and @davidb2 clinched the norms and rating and became proud owners of Grandmaster titles.
- Lichess created the official variant teams which helped to boost the activity of the variant scenes. Various variant championships were organized: Atomic World Championship (AWC), Horde World Championship (HWC), Crazyhouse World Championship (CWC), Racing Kings World Championship (RKWC), and Bughouse World Championship (BWC) all finished during last year. Antichess World Championship (ACWC) and Three-Check (TCWC) are still going on.
- Numerous other variant tournaments were played, such as the Racing Kings Olympiad, Atomic960 tournament, Crazyhouse960 tournament, House fishrandom.io tournament, variant team battles, and 24-hour revolution variant marathons.
- In the software section, Fairy-Stockfish team improved numerous neural networks releasing the strongest crazyhouse, atomic and racing kings nets thus far. Pychess (www.pychess.org) continued to host plenty of exotic variant tournaments and added the latest trending variant, Duck Chess, to their collection.

Happy New Year and may 2023 be even better!

What was your favourite – variant, chess, or The House – moment of 2022?

I had a lot of fun during Bundesliga voice chats on Discord. From variant world, @catask pulling a Magnus and not defending his Crazyhouse title was extraordinary. Also, @IMakeManyMistakes winning RKWC Final from 0-2 starting score against @CyberShredder was memorable.

The Atomic Revolution was fun

Bundesliga voice chats, and dropping my queens in 960 and my opponents not taking them.

Managing second place in the Bughouse World Championship after going 1-4 / 0-4 starting score throughout every candidates match is my personal favorite alongside hosting 3+ WC, lot of fun moments throughout

A moment that isn't my own: I personally enjoyed the finals of sutcunuri vs vlad_00 in AWC finals

I personally really enjoyed the atomic revolution!

List of things that happened in 2022 that we thought would never happen:

- TheFinnisher adopted BL.
- WDR played a game in BL.
- Opper played a BL skipping daily hyper.

List of things that have not happend and might not happen in a while:
- @meneermandje gets GM :D

Messing around in vcs and the experience following @chickencrossroad, marvel, and @williamyen create a new language was quite interesting

Watching @fumitoks plow through so many players while berserking all his games in many FRC tournaments was inspiring.