U.S. Championship Underway
The 2013 U.S. Championships ("men's" and women's) just started earlier this afternoon (at 2 p.m. ET) in St. Louis, now the chess capital of the U.S. by virtue of the chess capital of Rex Sinquefield. Focusing on the men's tournament, defending champion and the U.S.'s highest-rated player, Hikaru Nakamura, is sitting this one out to play in the super-tournament in Stavanger, Norway, starting next Tuesday. Gata Kamsky is playing though, and as a consolation prize of sorts for Nakamura's absence newly eligible GM Timur Gareev is making his debut.
Of the 24 players in this event, 19 are GMs; the other five may have qualified in some other way than by rating - by being the U.S. Junior Champion or by receiving some sort of special sponsor's invitation, for instance. As far as I can tell from the St. Louis club's website (which has gotten a little better over the years in making basic information available to those willing to hunt a while, but stilll has a ways to go) the tournament is a 9-round Swiss, and the day after round 9 there will be a playoff followed by the closing ceremonies. (About the playoff, is this "if necessary", or no matter what - say, for the top two finishers? The only way I even found that a date and time for the playoff existed was by clicking on the "tickets" tab!) Here are the first round pairings (players are GMs unless otherwise indicated):
- Gata Kamsky (2741) - Alexander Shabalov (2544)
- Marc Arnold (2538) - Timur Gareev (2674)
- Alexander Onischuk (2666) - Joel Benjamin (2534)
- Alexander Ivanov (2529) - Ray Robson (2620)
- Varuzhan Akobian (2616) - Melikset Khachiyan (2518)
- Conrad Holt (2513) - Samuel Shankland (2612)
- Robert Hess (2595) - Ben Finegold (2505)
- FM Jorge Sammour-Hasbun (2463) - Gregory Kaidanov (2593)
- Larry Christiansen (2579) - Yaacov Norowitz (2451) (I believe he's an IM-elect)
- FM John Bryant (2442) - Yuri Shulman (2570)
- Alexander Stripunsky (2570) - IM Kayden Troff (2421)
- FM Samuel Sevian (2371) (Also an IM-elect, I think) - Alejandro Ramirez (2551)
Reader Comments (2)
I didn't realize Mr. Norowitz got his third norm a couple of months ago. I guess I'm getting out of touch a little.
FM Sevian's application is listed as 'Open' on FIDE's list of title applications for the next Congress in Baku. I think that may be because his rating isn't yet past 2400, but he does have his three norms.
Dear Dennis, Glad you are on the mend, and am a regular visitor here, over many years, but almost never comment. Right you are!:
I don't look at quite as many chess sites as you, but not too far behind. And it is amazing, how sometimes major venues have such bad websites.
The failure is a simple set of eyes, fresh questions, lets see, what time does it start, and so on. Amazon does it, Apple TRIES TO DO IT, Google tries to do it, but not here.
Rex deserves every respect for what he started and funds. Like anything, folks have different skills, such as planning, creativity, finance, operations, compliance, and making web sites, well, not making them, but either hiring the right people to do it, or the folks ones hired caring to evaluate their work or put the people in place who can, well...........
The failure is to simply go through things as an end user. So much web design is bad, poorly done, page area not used, sequences that are Boolean failures.
I tried to find the start time for the USCC last night, and same as you, ticket sales! Dugh. A puzzle Dr. Nunn might try to solve.
In Wall Street, we called that Sales Prevention Tactics, but in this case, alas, not compliance, just ignorance.
If you ran a Cloud company, as I did, do not, do not, do not ask any technical staff to explain what Cloud is. Find someone who does not know what it is, learn it, and learn to explain it.
Architects do not have get to have prototypes, so they must MAKE THE PROCESS the project. So then you go forward, how do we get in the door, out the back, how do we keep the rain out, hot air in, cold out, where is the exit in a fire, is there light in this office that is pleasant? Architects can goof up, but done properly, is high art, so that you can take all this stuff and fulfill it, in great detail, planned not over weeks or months, but years. That technologists think they know how to do it guarantees they cannot.
As Gurdjieff said, man lives in sleep. Only once he knows it, can he begin to wake.
Keep up the great work, you do so much for chess Dennis! David Korn
PS and me? Editing is not my pleasure. I wrote this, hit send. Bye!