The 2018 PRO Chess League Season was the second season of the

PRO Chess League The Professional Rapid Online Chess League (PRO Chess League and abbreviated PCL) is an online rapid chess league operated by chess.com. It was preceded by the United States Chess League, which announced in 2016 that it would be renamed, reformatt ...

. It began on January 17 and ended on April 8 with the Armenia Eagles defeating the Chengdu Pandas to claim their first title. This season introduced new qualifications to join the league and an all-star game.

Qualification

In order to combat the large league, Shahade decided to cut the league from 48 teams to 32 teams as he believed the inaugural season was "a bit too large and chaotic".In order to determine which teams would return, he used the following: * 24 teams invited * 6 teams per Qualifier Tournament * 2 teams per fan vote

Qualification tournament

The qualification tournament took place on November 3 with two qualifiers. The event format was stated on the PRO Chess League website. * 13 round individual Swiss using time format of three minutes with two seconds of increment * Scores determined by adding sum of scores from all four team members * Top 2 teams from each qualifying tournament automatically qualify for PCL *Won fan vote to qualify for Stage 2

Super Saturday and Super Sunday

For 2018, the PCL introduced a new match format which allowed teams to play outside of their division. In these matches, each team played one single four-game match against eight other teams on Saturday, and another eight on Sunday. Once every team had played sixteen other teams, the total match points were added up. The following prizes were given: * 1st: 1 match win + $500 * 2nd-6th: 1 match win * 7th-10th: 1 match draw * 11th-16th: 1 match loss

Standings

The top four teams from each division qualify for the playoffs while the two worst teams are relegated from the league and will have to partake in the qualifiers in order to rejoin the league.

Playoffs

After the regular season, the top four teams from each division qualified for the playoffs with the teams being seeded 1–4 in their division. In addition, the teams that won their division were invited to play the final two round in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

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Folsom Street Foundry
*Advanced due to higher seed **Advanced due to higher draw odds ***Triple overtime victory

Awards

''Notes:'' *

All-Star Game

The 2018 All-Star Game was on September 8 with stage 1 and on September 9 for stage 2. The following event format was used. * Stage 1:

Round-robin tournament A round-robin tournament (or all-go-away-tournament) is a competition Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero ...

where every player plays one game against everyone else from other three teams, total of 12 games (Time control = 3, 1) * Stage 2:

Knockout round A knockout (abbreviated to KO or K.O.) is a fight-ending, winning criterion in several full-contact combat sports, such as boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, mixed martial arts, karate, some forms of taekwondo and other sports involving striking, a ...

. Seeding determined by total number of points in stage 1 (Time control = 3, 0)

References

{{Reflist 2018 in chess