Welcome to the Fall 2025 weekly newsletter! This is where we will share a weekly update on league standings, highlight some great moments from each week’s games, learn a thing or two from our coaches, and of course, share any news about Rookly.

Let’s take a look at our scores after our second week. You can click on the title of a league to view the full standings for that league. The standings pages are public, so please feel free to share with parents, friends, or whoever you think might be interested!

Note that our Monday scores remain unchanged because of the holiday last week!

Week #2 Standings

Game of the Week

Our game of the week this week goes to Fiyin O (Downtown Middle) and Samuel E (Fayerweather). This hyper-aggressive, action-packed 21 move game saw 13 checks in a row by white before it was over!

If you’re a fan of a sharp attack, I encourage you to check it out:

If you think one of your students’ games should be the next game of the week, please send Coach Lucas the PGN! His email is at the bottom of this newsletter.

Coaches’ Corner

Coach Lucas’s tip of the week:

Last week, we looked at how to avoid stalemate in the endgame by potentially underpromoting to a rook in order to be extra safe (and because it’s a fun exercise!)

This week, let’s learn an easy mating pattern with our queen, so we can avoid stalemates like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Do you notice anything about the relative positions of the white queen and the black king in all of these examples?

Stalemate can only occur when the queen and king are a knight’s move apart!

If you remember this rule, you’ll never stalemate your opponent.

Let’s learn an easy way to find a checkmate every time when in a queen + king vs king endgame. Our goals are simple:

Step 1: Limit the enemy king’s movement.

Step 2: Mirror the enemy king’s movements with our queen.

Notice how the available space for the black king keeps getting smaller?

Now let’s limit the black king’s movement even further by following him towards the corner. We have to be careful to make sure that he has two squares to move back and forth between!

Note that the king and queen are a knight’s move apart, but since the black king is safe on both g8 and h8, we aren’t risking stalemate!

Now let’s bring our king in to help.

And with our king helping, let’s use our queen to land checkmate!

Easy, right?

Looking forward to a great week full of checkmates!

If there’s anything that you need help with this week please feel free to get in touch with Coach Lucas at lucas@​rookly​.com.