I'm not sure how many people here are interested, but I always look forward to the USCL. The season starts on Tuesday, September 4th and runs until the final on December 1st. They just posted team rosters yesterday, which can be found at the main website link below.

http://uschessleague.com/

Most of these games are not extremely high profile, but they're fun to follow, particularly if some of your local players are playing. The coverage is usually exclusively on ICC, but this year ICC and Chess.com are splitting it, which should make for some good commentary variety.

Looking forward to watching some of the games.

This is the first time I've actually paid attention to chess in quite a while. But it seems odd. The divisions should just be "New England" and "Rest of US". It's why chess doesn't spread as rapidly, because they continually insist on big events or chess hubs to be located in one of 4 or 5 places year in and year out.

I also find it a bit disturbing that the website is sponsored by Pokerstars.com. Right on the right of the screen, the familiar spade with a 100% deposit bonus advertisement.....on a site noone outside of the US would care about.

In regards to the issue of there being too many teams from the Northeast - from a geographic stand point that might be true, but there's a very simple reason for that: that area has many more strong players than other areas of the country, and therefore can support many more teams. This is not really a League where players move from one city to another based upon which team hires them - a city relies mostly on local talent in order to compete.

While it would be nice (in my opinion) if the teams were more spread out, if we started giving teams to certain cities out West which don't already have them in order to accomplish that (random examples Las Vegas, Portland, Santa Fe, etc. etc.), then those teams would get completely killed in the League - they simply wouldn't be competitive.

As the League is now, all 16 teams are very competitive - in any given match either team can win, and each team has a realistic chance to win the Championship at the beginning of the year. Personally I find that to be a much better quality than most sports leagues (like the NBA, NFL, etc.) in which one often knows before season pretty much which teams are certain to make it to the playoffs and which others have no chance. Yes perhaps the USCL is not as geographically balanced as those Leagues, but I personally find it much more enjoyable to watch encounters where both sides always have a very real chance to win rather than having games which are pretty much guaranteed to be blow-outs before the game even starts.

The USCL isn't perfect - nothing is. But to say that we should balance the League geographically at the cost of real overall competitiveness - that seems like a very poor idea to me, one which would definitely lessen spectator interest which is one of the primary goals of the League.

The first USCL matches are tonight and tomorrow. Here's a link to the lineups for each team.

http://uschessleague.com/results.php?y=2012&w=1

As of right now we're at the halfway point of the USCL season; here's a link to the overall standings.

http://uschessleague.com/standings-2012.php

The NY Knights and NJ Knockouts are tied atop the East, while the Dallas Destiny have sole possession of the West with a superb 4.5/5 thus far (scoring 73% in individual games, wow).

Last night was one of the more interesting games I've seen in a long time. It was Getz-Abrahamyan on board 3 for the Dallas-Los Angeles match. White looked busted out of the opening and was down as much as 2.0 on the computer eval (or so I'm told, I haven't checked it out yet). But black wasn't able to find a win and ended up resigning later in the game short of a forced mate. Really, really entertaining game to watch. Here's a link to it.

http://www.uschessleague.com/games/getzabrahamyan12.htm