Caruana To Play in the U.S. Championship?!
It seems that Fabiano Caruana has received an invitation to play in the 2013 U.S. Championship, and he has tweeted his intention to play, schedule permitting. For years I've jokingly appended "send him back" when reporting news of Caruana's successes, but unless he's moving back and planning to represent the USA in international events I don't get this move by the US Chess Federation at all. He doesn't live here and isn't doing a thing for chess in the United States, so why are we paying him to show up and take money and an opportunity away from someone who lives and works here? In American politics, we ridicule as "carpet-baggers" politicians who move to a district just to get elected there; here, we're "electing" Caruana without even making him move. If he's changing federations, he's welcome back, but otherwise this is insane.
[HT: Kevin Connelly]
Reader Comments (2)
Very interesting.... this is against both FIDE and USA rules to allow someone of a foreign federation to play in a different country's championship.
[DM: You sure about this? What about world citizen Kosteniuk, who lives in Russia and the U.S. and represents Russia, but plays in the Swiss championship because her husband has dual U.S./Swiss citizenship? She plays in the Russian Women's Championship every year and in the Swiss Championship too.]
In fact, US requires a person to be of the federation for a full year. This prevents Gareev from playing the US as well... and he at least switched his federation. Not to mention the fee based on rating for changing Federation...
http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12004/319/
The USCF denies the invitation went out...
However, my friend confirms Caruana has received it... and indeed he himself has confirmed as you yourself already pointed out:
https://twitter.com/FabianoCaruana/status/277360934941491201
And then it links to Susan's event...[DM: You mean Susan's blog/site?]
http://susanpolgar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/caruana-received-invitation-to-us.html
However, Susan has several other facts wrong... Kamsky is not in the Grand Prix cycle... he was just an emergency one time replacement for Vugar Gashimov. One must also question how Susan knows the Fide Grand Prix dates interfere with the US Championship event dates.... as those haven't been published on the USCF Site... some of the players have been told but not all....
which brings us to the full circle... what version of the story do we trust?
I suspect an error happened and that the inexperienced chess club in St. Louis sent out a bad invite and rather than admit a mistake... has created this backwards fiasco. But the way its headed now... the USCF could be headed for another headache lawsuit...
A related political disaster is FIDE's new rule to retroactively charge arbiters fees to keep their titles, run events as well as rate them (in addition to the rating fees). dozens of US arbiters have already declined to keep their titles or run more FIDE events anymore. FIDE has effectively crushed most norm events in the US with this one sweeping, greedy and corrupt maneuver.
[DM: There are dozens of US arbiters? Sounds a bit hyperbolic to me, though I don't doubt the ill effect and motivation of FIDE as a general proposition. How much is FIDE charging the arbiters?]
I believe that the issue of unfairness in getting two cracks at Zonal qualifiers trumps everything else by FIDE rules. This was commented in Susan's item but seems not to have been clarified. Of course there are complicated ways this could be resolved. What I said in Italian in a comment to Susan's item is that I hope all 3 can play and would love to see the US Championship reach category 19 (2701+ actually) with 10 or 12 players. Maybe the resolution for now is: Ciao 2013; ciao 2014?