2018 PRO Chess League season

The 2018 PRO Chess League Season was the second season of the PRO Chess League. It began on January 17 and ended on April 8 with the Armenia Eagles defeating the Chengdu Pandas to claim their first title. This season introduced new qualifications to join the league and an all-star game.

Qualification
In order to combat the large league, Shahade decided to cut the league from 48 teams to 32 teams as he believed the inaugural season was "a bit too large and chaotic".In order to determine which teams would return, he used the following:


 * 24 teams invited
 * 6 teams per Qualifier Tournament
 * 2 teams per fan vote

Qualification tournament
The qualification tournament took place on November 3 with two qualifiers. The event format was a 13 round individual swiss (time control 3+2), with a team's score decided by summing the scores of their four team members. The top three teams from each qualifier automatically qualified, and the fourth to sixth placed teams were placed into a fan vote to decide the final qualifier.

Super Saturday and Super Sunday
For 2018, the PCL introduced a new match format which allowed teams to play outside of their division. In these matches, each team played one single four-game match against eight other teams. The standings were decided on game points, with the top 6 teams being awarded a match win and teams finishing 7th-10th being awarded a match draw. In addition, the winning team was awarded a $500 bonus.

Standings
The top four teams from each division qualify for the playoffs while the two worst teams are relegated from the league and will have to partake in the qualifiers in order to rejoin the league.

Playoffs
After the regular season, the top four teams from each division qualified for the playoffs with the teams being seeded 1–4 in their division. In addition, the teams that won their division were invited to play the final two round in San Francisco at the Folsom Street Foundry.


 * *Advanced due to higher seed
 * ***Triple overtime victory

All-Star Game
The 2018 All-Star Game was on September 8 with stage 1 and on September 9 for stage 2. The following event format was used.


 * Stage 1: Round-robin tournament where every player plays one game against everyone else from other three teams, total of 12 games (Time control = 3|1)
 * Stage 2: Knockout round. Seeding determined by total number of points in stage 1 (Time control = 3|0)