Club Of The Month: ONE WORLD League
Welcome back to Club of the Month! This monthly series introduces you to some of the incredible communities we have on Chess.com, so you can learn more about what they do and who they are. It might even give you the inspiration to start your very own club, or give you some useful tips to take your existing club to the next level.
We're pleased to announce that May's Club of the Month is ONE WORLD League. More than just a chess club, ONE WORLD League organizes multiple large-scale tournaments in which other clubs from all over the world can participate.
Chess.com: What is your name and what is your role at ONE WORLD League?
Tournamentix: I'm @Tournamentix, the Founder and Super Admin of ONE WORLD League.
How would you describe your chess club?
ONE WORLD League (1WL) offers an extremely wide range of competitions based on the idea of promotion and relegation. We do our best to manage these competitions as fairly and openly as possible.
We run several annual tournaments, which include opportunities for all sizes and strengths of clubs. Our main tournament, the League, is played in five different rating ranges in standard chess and two additional ranges in Chess960.
There are also annual tournaments for small clubs (FIREFLY Championship), regional and closely-located clubs (GEO Championship), or special events for huge matches (GRAND PRIX, with 100+ boards in standard chess and 50+ boards in Chess960) as well as miscellaneous competitions throughout the year, including Vote Chess.
Can you share the history of your club with our readers?
Founded in January 2018, we're currently running our fifth season with a total of nearly 300 participating clubs. To get an idea of how things work, feel free to check out our presentation of 1WL results.
The first (and still the main) project was an annual league with divisions at different rating ranges (OPEN rating, Under 1800, Under 1600, Under 1400, Under 1200, 960 OPEN and 960 Under 1400). Matches can take place across anywhere between 12 to 40+ boards at once.
Clubs can participate with up to seven teams in different rating ranges. Soon after starting our league, we realized that many clubs were asking for various formats. People were really eager for additional competitions, and as a result we've gradually increased our offering.
What inspired you to take a leadership role in your chess club?
In 2017, I created my first chess club on Chess.com. I was eager and very motivated to see this club participating in competitions! Over the course of nine months, I took part in our first 'season' with weekly matches against other clubs which were already competing against each other.
Only as our first season started did I begin to understand that the two annual tournaments (the only ones we could join at the time) offered less than half of the matches that we regularly played to prepare for them.
If this was our situation, it seemed likely to me that other clubs might also be interested to play a greater amount of competitive team matches.... I worked together with my colleague @sujayrao, and we developed a new and different format for an additional league (with many more team matches to play, and less restrictive rules).
Does your club meet in person? If so, where and when can prospective members find you? If not, when do you typically have events online?
ONE WORLD League only exists online on Chess.com! However, it's pretty easy to catch us online and take part in our events. There are weekly Swiss system tournaments (on Saturdays) for individual players in different time controls. Twice a month we're also running Multi Club Arenas (Blitz on the 2nd Friday and Rapid on the 4th Friday); all these tournaments are organized as annual competitions.
Since the war against Ukraine started, we're also running weekly 24h Multi Club Arenas for Peace. All these events are managed in the 1WL LIVE tournaments section.
What separates your chess club from other clubs?
ONE WORLD League is as fair as possible: we don't have rules with the intention to restrict players or club admins, we don't need multiplayer or flag rules, and we don't have any intention to alter the results of team matches. We try our best to offer a wide variety of annual tournaments to include as many different clubs as possible.
How can Chess.com members get involved in your club?
The ONE WORLD League itself is reserved for admins of participating clubs. If admins of clubs are interested, they can apply for membership. However, all Chess.com members are invited to join the 1WL Live Tournaments to participate in our live events, to follow our results, or to join the ONE WORLD League Players' Lounge to play in several daily chess competitions.
What advice would you give to clubs on Chess.com that are just starting out and would like to grow?
It's exactly the same as in real life: if you create a real-life chess club and devote time to it, it's natural to build up a team and start participating in competitions offered by your national chess federation.
Starting a club on Chess.com can be done with a similar approach; there are a lot of different competitions out there. New clubs only need to look around and decide which of these competitions is the right fit for them.
Thanks to ONE WORLD League for providing us with their answers for this month's article. Make sure you check out their page on Chess.com!
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