After many baffling blunders and topsy-turvy turnarounds, the fifth edition of Chess.com’s PogChamps Five, the amateur streamer chess competition, has come to an end on Aug. 19. Both matches of the live finals in Las Vegas, NV delivered on the promise of the event: heaps of fun, massive errors and plenty of personality.
After weeks of toils and hilarity, PogChamps Five concluded with Welsh YouTuber CDawgVA crowned the “PogChampion” as the two final matches of the competition pitting streamers against each other on the sixty-four squares of the chessboard took place in person in the U.S.
The winner of the upper bracket final was voice actor and content creator CDawgVA, one of the pre-tournament rating favorites, who had to fight back multiple times against fellow resurgent YouTuber Franks-is-heres to become the fifth PogChampion.
It wasn’t a straightforward or clean affair, as evidenced by moments like this when unorthodox piece sacrifices had to be employed by the Welshman to swing back a problematic position in his favor—a move not at all missed by host Ludwig.
Over in the lower bracket, returning participant QTCinderella fell short against Norwegian Trackmania content creator Wirtual in a close match featuring plenty of discoveries for players and fans alike, like realizing that castling with physical pieces isn’t all that simple, and attempts to draw arrows on a physical board.
Ultimately, Wirtual secured a 3-0 win in the consolation bracket in as clean a fashion as you can possibly expect in an amateur competition like this, winning all three games but leaving plenty of fun opportunities for his opponent to turn things around.
As an added bonus, the live finals also featured a bonus matchup between Tyler1 and his brother, Erobb221, dubbed the “Salty Suite,” which reached a predictably explosive crescendo as Tyler1 went down in flames.
Related: DDoS attacks nearly checkmate Chess.com ahead of PogChamps 5 event
CDawgVA earned himself a $20,000 USD bounty alongside the trophy and the prestige of becoming a PogChampion, while Frank picked up a $12,000 portion of the $100,000 total prize pool. Wirtual took home $7,000 while QTCinderella got a $5,000 check – not that it stopped her from succinctly saying “That was not fun, and I did not like it.”
Here is the full list of participants of PogChamps 5, in alphabetical order:
- CDawgVA
- Daily Dose of Internet
- Distortion2
- Franks-is-heres
- Fuslie
- Ghastly
- I did a thing
- Jarvis
- Jinnytty
- Papaplatte
- QTCinderella
- Squeex
- Sykkuno
- Tyler1
- Wirtual
- xQc
