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The Rookly Fall 2025 Season is Upon Us!
Your weekly recap of league standings, plus a look at the Game of the Week, and a visit to the Coaches' Corner.
Lucas Thompson
October 13, 2025
Welcome to the first 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.
First let’s look at last week’s scores. 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!
And now, without further ado, here are the results of the first week of the Fall 2025 season:
Week #1 Standings
(4:00pm ET) | (3:30pm PT) |
|---|---|
Cardinal Kung - 23 | WIISER - 28 |
Newman - 20 | Alta Vista - 23 |
Boys’ Latin MD - 18 | Temecula Prep - 20 |
Hannah Senesh - 15 | Oregon Episcopal School - 20 |
Drew Charter - 15 | Lakeside School - 20 |
(3:30pm ET) | (4:00pm PT) |
|---|---|
Ransom Everglades - 26 | Stanford High School - 23 |
Pace Academy - 22 | Holy Ghost Prep - 19 |
Grayson - 19 | The Branson School - 17 |
Pierrepont School - 17 | St. Joseph’s Notre Dame - 17 |
The Journey School/Cary Academy - 16 | Bishop Mora - 13 |
(5:00pm ET) | (3:00pm ET) |
|---|---|
St. George’s - 24 | Opportunities For Learning - 26 |
Montgomery Academy - 24 | Nativity Prep - 21 |
Manatee School of the Arts - 11 | St. John Paul II - 18 |
Lake Wales Charter - 9 | Marvin Academy - 8 |
Deerfield-Windsor - 9 | Hendersonville Middle - 4 |
(3:30pm ET) | (4:30pm ET) |
|---|---|
Calvary Day - 25 | Trinity Episcopal - 27 |
Camden Military Academy - 18 | Rogers High - 20 |
Overhills Middle - 14 | Eureka Springs - 20 |
Grace Montessori - 11 | Austin Jewish Academy - 20 |
Discovery Academy - 11 | Lakeside - 17 |
Game of the Week
Our game of the week comes to us from the Tuesday Queen league and goes to Sebby S (The Branson School) and Conrad S (St. Joseph’s Notre Dame).
These two heavyweights went into this game with undefeated records: 5-0-1 for Sebby and 4-0-1 for Conrad.
Their only draw? To each other.
With Branson and St. Joseph’s neck-and-neck on the scoreboard, the pressure was on, and as the hour neared its end, most of the league stayed late to watch Sebby (white) and Conrad (black) duke it out.
This one went the distance—after 85 moves, the Conrad won on time. Here is the final position:
85. Rb8 Kd2 0-1
Both players fought and fought, but struggled to make progress for about the last half of the game, so the audience was left wondering:
Did we have another draw on our hands?
The Lichess analysis says yes! From move 46 onwards, this game was in a totally drawn position.
Amazing work by both Sebby and Conrad! Get ready for a rematch!
Note: you too can export your students’ games for analysis! We will have an FAQ coming soon on how to long into/navigate your school administrator dashboard where you can view/download the PGN of every game your students ever play on Rookly (among other things).
If you can’t wait for the FAQ, get in touch with Coach Lucas now! His email is at the bottom of this newsletter.
Coaches’ Corner
Coach Lucas’s tip of the week:
I saw so many great games this week!
I also saw many games where one player was far ahead in the endgame, but the game ended in stalemate because the other player’s king ran out of legal moves.
Games like this:
Stalemate #1
And this:
Stalemate #2
And this?
Stalemate #3
This phenomenon was most common in games where the player who was ahead had promoted one or more pawns to a queen.
It’s always tempting (and almost always best) to promote to a queen because she’s the most powerful piece, but she can also be easy to accidentally stalemate the opponent with.
An exercise that I used to do avoid this is to underpromote to a rook instead of a queen.
Let’s take a look at our previous examples, but with rooks in place of the queens:
Now instead of stalemate, black is forced to move the king to c8, and white’s next move Re8 is checkmate!
Non-stalemate #1
Black’s only legal move here is Ka4. This will chase white’s rook on b3 away temporarily, but checkmate is soon to follow via a classic ladder mate.
Non-stalemate #2
Even in our silly example, black still has the legal move Ke7!
Non-stalemate #3
Am I saying that you should never promote a pawn to a queen? Of course not!
The queen is objectively the more powerful piece, but she makes accidentally stalemating your opponent much easier. Next week, we'll go over checkmating patterns to help avoid this common mistake!
New at Rookly: Avatars
Coach Lucas in avatar form! Students’ shirt and background will match their school colors.
If your students played last week, then you probably noticed that we now have customizable avatars!
We took a little bit of extra time during the start of our first matches last week to create avatars. This week, we’ll be starting the leagues right on time, so if your students need time to customize their avatars I suggest joining a couple minutes early!
Please let us know if your students have any ideas for new ways that they would like to be able to personalize their avatars!
A Message from the WIISER Team
Our WIISER friends in the Monday En Passant League have some exciting news to share with everyone!
Howdy! It’s the Chess Friends!
We’re three chess kids in Seattle who just published a book, by kids for kids, called Q&A Chess Tournament Edition. It’s a fun, friendly guide full of illustrations to help you become a tournament chess player! Get your copy here: Q&A Chess: Tournament Edition. Books We also blog regularly on our website: Blog | Chess Friends Books about all things chess, so be sure to check that out too! Oh and Rookly fam, maybe we'll get to play this season! We are team WIISER Homeschool!
Cheers!
The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, and The Legend Vivi
If you and your team also have news that you’d like to share with the Rookly world, please send your submissions to the email below!
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.
Looking forward to another great week of chess!