Shankland vs Krush in round 2 on board 8, French, Chistyakov Defense (by transposition). This is going to be an epic US derby.

who are the 2p2 chess-endbosses playing this tournament?

The match-ups in the Open section got interesting awfully quick! Round two (still day one) and all the top GMs are playing opponents rated in the high 2400s. Not that the GMs aren't big favorites on all the top boards, but those are definitely more loseable games than you usually see in round two of these types of tournament.

It's really cool all the live coverage they are doing, but man oh man, it is hard to listen to the main commentators. Their language is SO stilted.

Makes you appreciate the good broadcasters, it's not so easy.

If only I'd seen this months ago....


Based on my ACF rating, my performance rating in a number of non officially rated tournaments of various time controls and structures as well as my online ratings, games and results. I'd estimate that my USCF OTB strength to be approximately 2000.

At 19 I'm basically just underated because I haven't played enough since I moved to have an accurate rating. Even a couple of years ago not too long after I started playing chess seriously I was already severely underated in tournaments I did play.

If I had known about this I may well have attempted yo raise the funds for it since I could play in the u1600 without doing anything underhand or dodgey, sandbaghing ect.

BJJ, are you following Jeffrey Xiong's performance? Ridiculous. 3.5/5 so far, 2697 performance rating, played 4 GMs.

I believe they want to have the tournament next year as well. Plenty of time to prepare for that.

Pretty cool tournament, I think. I might play in next year's under 2000 section myself.

The only result I'd seen for him was the one loss. Had no idea the other four games were that great for him. Way too much going on right now to keep track of, between Millionaire Chess, World Junior Championship, and Baku Grand Prix. Updates on stuff like this that I may have missed are much appreciated, thanks!

The final four who will meet on Monday, in parentheses where they were seeded originally, according to rating:

Wesley So (1)
Yu Yangyi (4)
Ray Robson (11)
Zhou Jianchao (19)