Rookly’s final regular season competition will be held the week of April 28, meaning next week is the last week of Rookly’s season. It has been a long and fun season, and we are excited to see how these final few weeks go.

Rookly will hold two cross-league tournaments for our top teams and top individual players. The tournaments will be held in May. We want the tournaments to be as accessible as possible for schools, so your input on the day matters. We are looking at holding these tournaments the week of May 12th.

The team tournament will feature 16 teams across our seven leagues. Four players from each of these respective teams will represent their school in our Inter-League Championship. We will reach out to the qualifying teams following our final regular season match on May 1.

Our second tournament will be held for the top individual players in our league. Over 2,000 students have played in Rookly this year, but a select few stand out. We have seen amazing performances in all of our leagues, and it is time we pair the top students against each other.

How are the top team scores calculated?

We have a method of calculating scores over an individual week, as well as over the course of the season. Please find this detailed below:

For a single week:

Wins count as one point, draws and losses count as 0. The total team score shown on the leaderboard is the total points from the top 4 players of every team.
- Top 4 scoring is designed to keep the league fair for teams of different sizes.
- Any players outside their team’s top 4 do not impact their team’s standing directly, but their performances can ward off other teams by denying points, or they can win and move into their team’s top 4 to increase the team score.
Placing in the top 3 for a week will give bonus points:
- +3 for 1st place
- +2 for 2nd place
- +1 for 3rd place

For the whole season:

Team score is calculated as your team’s 6 best match results.
This ensures schools can miss multiple weeks without disadvantaging themselves, but playing additional weeks can still improve your team score.

What are the plans for next year?

We appreciate your school’s participation in Rookly’s league this year. We are excited for more chess and more competition.

Our Fall 2025 League is already shaping up. Please email [email protected] to schedule a meeting and reserve your spot!

Moment of the Match

Here’s something you don’t see often! In the game between Rick S (Legacy Christian School) and Owen F (St. Matt’s), Owen was able to land checkmate by promoting his pawn to a queen.

Mini Lesson: How to Checkmate with King and Rook

No more stalemates! Let’s learn how to win every time in a king and rook endgame.

To deliver checkmate with our rook and king, we have two goals:

Force the opponent’s king to the edge of the board.
Have our rook deliver check while blocking off any escape routes for our opponent’s king with your own.

King and rook checkmates examples

All of these positions share the two fundamental elements of king and rook checkmates:

The opponent’s king is on the edge of the board.
Our rook delivers check while our king blocks the opponent’s king from escaping.

But how do we get there?

Let’s start with our king and rook on their home squares, and the opponent’s king in the middle of the board. Since we want to deliver checkmate on the edge, the middle of the board is the safest area for the opponent’s king.

Note: If you find yourself with only a king against a king and rook, do your best to stay in the middle of the board and you might run out your opponent’s clock!

Starting position

First, let’s move our rook up to cut the board in half for the opponent’s king. Our opponent starts to chase down our rook, but our rook is much more mobile so we don’t have to worry about that yet. Our king moves up to get involved in pushing the black king up the board.

1. Ra4 Kd5 2. Kd2 Kc5 3. Kc3 Kb5

Our rook is under pressure, but this is actually a great position for us. A visual cue we want to look for is our king and our opponent’s king being a knight’s move away from each other.

Kings a knight’s move away from each other

In this instance, we would want to move our rook for two reasons. Obviously we want to keep our rook, but we also want the kings to line up in a way that is advantageous to us. Here, aside from moving backwards, which would help us, black has two options, a5 and c5.

4. Rh4

Black chooses a5, and after moving our king to b3, black has 3 options: b5, b6, and a6.

4. …Ka5 5. Kb3

Two of black’s options move backwards and help us, so black probably won’t choose those. Instead, black moves to b5, which is exactly what we want. Our rook can deliver check, and our king covers the fourth rank, so the black king has to move backwards.

5. …Kb3 6. Rh5

The black king has to move back, and we can move our own king up, claim more space on the board, and repeat this process until we get the black king to the edge of the board.

6. …kc6 7. Kc4

But wait a second - did you notice something earlier? Black actually helped us out, but we were so focused on moving the black king in one direction that we missed it. Let’s go back to this position, when black could have gone to a5 or c5.

Back to 4. Rh4

Remember what we said about the middle of the board being the safest area of the board for the black king? Black forgot about this and moved to the edge, which helped us out.

Instead of getting our kings to line up, let’s bring our rook in!

4. …Ka5 5. Rb3

Now that we are at the edge of the board we can find checkmate using the method we learned earlier. The checkmate strategy is the same as forcing the opponent’s king backwards, only this time, there’s no space to move backwards. Let’s get our rook to a safe place first.

5. …Ka6 6. Rb1

And now let’s get to work.

6. …Ka5 7. Kc4 Ka6 8. Kc5 Ka7 9. Kc6 Ka8 10. Kc7 Ka7

We’ve gone the kings lined up…

11. Ra1#

And viola! Checkmate!

This Week in Chess

You can soon learn or practice chess on Duolingo! Alongside other non-language courses like music and math, in the coming weeks Duolingo will be offering bite-sized chess lessons that can teach you chess basics and beyond. It will be available on iOS in the coming weeks.

Magnus Carlsen wins the 2025 Grenke Chess Freestyle Open with a perfect 9/9 score. Never heard of Freestyle Chess? Perhaps more commonly referred to as Chess960, and originally as Fischerandom (named after Bobby Fischer, who invented it), Freestyle Chess randomizes starting positions of the pieces on the back row (which are mirrored on both sides). There are 960 possible configurations, hence the name. Fischer initially came up with it to encourage creativity in chess, and to discourage rote memorization of opening theory. Give it a try!