Ignacio Defends 4-Player Chess Title

Luis Ignasio, aka EyeoftheTiger1204, defended his title in the second edition of the 4-Player Chess Championship. Despite starting the first game of the Knockout by finishing last, he made what commentator Jai Sandhu called “a sensational return after a rough start.” CM Vahan Nalbandyan came in second and Kole Robertson came in third.

The 4-Player Chess Championship is part of the Chess.com Community Championships, open to all members of the official Chess.com Community Club, with a first prize of $1,800 and a total prize fund of $5,000. Next month’s event will feature the variant King of the Hill on May 6-8.

Prizes

4-Player Chess

4-Player Chess is one of the most popular variants on Chess.com. It’s just like regular chess, but with one tiny difference: four players on one board. One massive board with 160 squares.

This tournament featured the Free-for-All variant (yes, a variant of a variant), which means there are no teams. The goal of this variant is to finish the game with more points than your opponents. There are many ways in which a player can earn points:

• By checkmating an opponent (+20);
• By stalemating oneself (+20);
• By stalemating an opponent (+10 for each player still in the game);
• By checking more than one king simultaneously with a queen (+1 for two kings, +5 for three);
• By checking more than one king simultaneously with a piece other than a queen (+5 for two kings, +20 for three);
• By capturing active pieces (+1 for a pawn or promoted queen, +3 for a knight, +5 for a bishop, +5 for a rook, and +9 for a queen).

There were two stages of the tournament: a Semifinals with eight players and a Final with four.

Qualifiers & Tournament Format

From the eight Qualifiers on April 13-16, eight winners advanced to the Knockout on April 17. Each of the qualifiers was a two-hour arena with the same format and time control as the championship. Luis Ignacio was the defending champion, and CM Hamlet Antonyan was the runner-up from last year.

4-Player Chess Qualifier Winners

In the Semifinals, there were two groups with four players each. The players had to accrue as many points as they could in a 90-minute arena, with each game featuring a four-minute time control with no bonus time. The scoring system went as follows for every individual game: 3-1-1-0, with the three points going to first place.

In the Final, it wasn’t a timed arena. The first player to reach 7 points and then win a game won.

Semifinals

Ignacio, Robertson, Antonyan, and Nalbandyan advanced from the eight-player Semifinals. Ignacio was an unstoppable force that won all six games in his bracket, while Semifinal 2 was closer.

With Ignacio dominating his semifinal group, the broadcast almost exclusively focused on the Semifinal 2.

One prevailing strategy—a kind of unspoken agreement—among all the players was to work with the player directly across. For example, Blue and Green worked together, and Red and Yellow matched as well. Almost without exception, they refused to capture their corresponding player’s pieces, and sometimes they even sacrificed their own pieces to bail out the matching player.

Take the following position as an example, from the near-midpoint of the arena. The green and blue queens can capture each other, but it’s in neither player’s interest to lose their “partner’s” queen. Instead, they work together to control the center.

If a player loses their counterpart, they are usually surrounded on both sides by the remaining players—a very bad situation. We saw this happen to Green (Prathamesh Ramane) when Blue (Gonzalo Rojo), in this case, didn’t lend a hand. 

That specific game had an extremely rare ending, with three players tying for first—something Sandhu said he’s seen only a handful of times in the thousands of games he’s played. All the players except Prathamesh, who got zero points in last place, split 1.67 points each—that’s why the specific .67 decimal was in the final scores.

In the following game, Sandhu highlighted the importance of king safety. At one point, he suggested even sacrificing a knight for two pawns on l4, just to prevent the l5-pawn break that happened. Red (Rojo) finished this game in third, after his king’s pawn cover got blown open.

4-Player Chess can be a lot to handle, and even the experienced GM Benjamin Bok exclaimed at one point, “I have no idea what’s going on, and then Green also drew all those arrows across the board!” Sometimes it’s just impossible to know what’s happening.

… but checkmate, most chess players can understand. The same game saw a nice denouement, with Blue and Yellow working together to shoot down the red king on the diagonals.

Nalbandyan won the very last game to advance with Antonyan, and six points were enough for Robertson to advance, in second place, from Semifinal 1.

Final

In the Final, the first to seven points and then win a game earned the championship title.

All players are anonymous until the end of each game, and an important strategy is to mask your identity. Ignacio said, “In the last championship, I actually did change my playing style and it worked in the long run, but this time was different.” In this edition, he simply played whatever moves he thought were best.

Something didn’t click in the first game, however, as Robertson finished first and Ignacio, who had only won his games in the Semifinals, came in last place. A real shocker.

Playing Blue, Ignacio got checkmated on move 10, with Red and Yellow working as a team. 10.Qxa9, taking the bishop, was the finishing blow (not yet played on the board below), delivering a double check and mate.

Ignacio redeemed himself by winning the next game, but Nalbandyan won the game after that to take the lead. 

The game that followed showed another example of players working as a team, even as either of them has the option to double-cross. By placing his rook on j8, Blue (Antonyan) backed up his partner, Green (Nalbandyan), in landing the decisive blow on the j3-square.

Still, Ignacio won that game to reach seven points and then won another to win the championship. Looking back, he was surprisingly positive about the game he lost: “I think that was one of my best moments in a tournament because I hadn’t lost a single game in the previous tournament, so I couldn’t get that feeling”—the feeling of danger, presumably, which he quickly resolved.

Speaking about how he got interested in the variant, Ignacio credited the coronavirus pandemic lockdown. “I think it was because of the obsession, you know, because during the 2020-2021 coronavirus, I used to spend most of my time at home, and I was getting bored and I discovered chess and improved little by little.” He added that as he becomes a better regular chess player, it helps him in 4-Player Chess as well.

Up next, we will have King of the Hill! Will you play in the Qualifiers? Let us know in the comments!

The 4-Player Chess Championship is part of the 2026 Chess.com Community Championships, and the event was open to all members of the Chess.com Community Club. The winners of eight Qualifiers played in Semifinals and a Final to decide the best 4-Player Chess player on Chess.com. The event featured a $5,000 prize fund. 

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