Oct. 9-13, 2014 Las Vegas, NV there will be a tournament organized by GM Maurice Ashley that will have a million dollar prize fund totally guaranteed.

GM Ashley organized and ran the HB Global Chess Tournament in May 2005 in Minnesota which had a $500,000 guaranteed prize fund.

http://millionairechess.com/


Prize fund:

HB Global I heard wasn't a success and that's why they didn't run the same tournament again in 2006.
What do you guys think, will enough people pony up $1,000! to enter and even more to fly to and stay in Las Vegas?

$40k to win the U1600 division? Epic sandbagging opportunity.

Can't sandbag your way down to a lower section.

http://millionairechess.com/tournament/faq/

The only way to cheat is if you didn't have a USCF rating at all and then structured your way into having a 15xx USCF rating by winning/losing games on purpose.

For example: someone who plays on ICC and has a 2200 ELO but no USCF rating could structure his rating over 25 games (losing certain games on purpose) and produce a 1500 rating.

And there's enough incentive that something like this is guaranteed to happen. How rare are "off the grid" 2000+ chess players anyway? I'm not a serious chess player and don't play tournaments (and wouldn't be good enough to sandbag the U1600 title even if I wanted to), but it seems obvious to me that a legit U1600 player would have no chance at winning because of all the sandbagging the prize money would attract. Am I wrong about this? Awarding any kind of serious prize money in the lower divisions seems like it would turn into a sandbagging contest. (Or if not technically sandbagging, call it structuring or whatever, all I'm saying is I strongly suspect someone whose published rating does not approach their true skill level is going to win.)

EvilSteve,

I pretty much agree with you. It wouldn't take many off the grid 2000+ players to effect a tournament. I imagine there has to be at least a handful out there.

Some serious structuring is very likely imo to happen for the U1600 section (the lowest section where top prize is $40,000).

I wonder if 1,000 people will actually enter, covering the prize fund with entry fees, or if this will end up with an overlay. If any of the class sections were to end up with 20 or fewer players in it, then all (early) entrants would be guaranteed their entry fee back. Even at 50 entrants in a section, everyone is guaranteed at worst a $400 cost (plus travel expenses) to play in this.

Will there actually be 50+ players in each section willing to plop down a grand to play? I would love to, but almost certainly won't. I'll definitely be keeping a close eye on the registrant counts though.

This is cool. Play chess and poker and all other Las Vegas fun. I hope the tourney uses full fledged metal detectors or something to reduce electronic cheating. I may dust off my chess set for this. It's been decades. Now how does that Benoni Gambit line go again??

So I have no USCF rating, but have been thinking bout getting 1. Tons of incentive here, I am around 1900-1950 on chess.com now, but have been playing like crap lately. SO, should i b sandbaggn this tourney or wat?

With $40k on the line, how much of a chance do you really think your 1950 playing strength will give you in the shark infested waters of U1600?

I personally don't think there will be enough entrants for this event to be a success (satisfy sponsors, make a profit, etc.).

HB Global in 2005 I've heard was not a success. They were planning on having it be an annual event but no event was scheduled in 2006 and beyond.

Also Grandmasters are not given free entry for this event. They also have to pay $1,000 to enter. One of the perks of making GM was free entry to tournaments, and now they have to pay. I imagine most Grandmasters will not be happy. Way to irk the Grandmasters who are bringing talent and prestige to your event!

It's not just a $1,000 entry fee, but a plane ticket to/from Las Vegas, and paying for hotel for 5 nights in Las Vegas. This is approaching a $2000 total cost. How many people are going to want shell out this much money for a chess tournament? All to go there, lose a game, and realize that they just lit $2000 of their hard earned money on fire.

The last 5 world open's have had a range of 1108-1376 entrants. This number of people was obtained over a holiday (july 4th) weekend. With an increased entry fee and an early October date, I believe this tournament will not reach it's target number of participants.

Huh.

I guess there's not much risk of this tournament failing to cover the prize pool with entry fees. Who wants to offer odds on the tournament being held? Sounds like you're betting against, McLovin?

Um, not sure if, or how serious, u r. lol I really duno how strong those ratings r in over the board games. An answer would b great, what does a 2000 chess.com rating roughly equivillant to? Either way sounds like an awesome tournament

The point he is making is that with such a large prize this would likely be the strongest U1600 field in history with a surprising number of sandbaggers.

Yes, this. I'm expecting it to be a complete joke and look forward to hearing how the tournament progresses, and how many back and forth cheating allegations are exchanged among the top contenders (who will all know everyone who beats them is cheating since they never lose to U1600s anymore except when they're doing it on purpose for rating maintenance). Same kind of thing I'd expect if the Special Olympics started offering large cash prizes.

Nice find with that provision.

1500 people committing to lock up $1,000 for 6.5 months? On a chess tournament?

In this economy?

Yep, I'm betting against.

Word. totally get that logic, but its still a cool tournament in VEGAS! That potential cancellation sux tho. anyway, last derail, what does a solid 2000 chess.com blitz rating roughly equal? thx n advance

Probably at least 1900+ USCF strength. It's blitz, so there will be a wide range, but depending on relative blitz skills to skill at standard time controls, most American chess.com 2000s probably have USCF ratings in the 1900-2100 range. The bell curve for blitz ratings at chess.com peaks around a mean of about 1100, and 2000 puts you well into the 99th percentile. I'm guessing that the pool of people who play free internet blitz is probably collectively weaker than the pool of people who play in USCF rated tournaments (more commitment is involved in shelling out money to play several long games, usually over multiple days). So 99th percentile at chess.com blitz might translate to, I don't know, 95th percentile in USCF ratings?

Here is a chess.com member with a blitz sample size of over 20,000. He has a USCF rating of 2105, which is good for 97th percentile nationally.

I'd say from those data points that it's probably hard to break 2000 in chess.com blitz rating without being at least 1900 strength, and obviously some players much stronger than that (well... one at least...) are only 2000 themselves.

You might be in pretty good shape to sandbag, if you value money more than your integrity. Play 25+ rated games by October, be careful not to win enough to ever have a published rating over 1600, and you could well be one of the stronger players in the U1600 section even if it is filled with sandbaggers. Almost certainly not *the* strongest, but probably pretty high up the list.

Or you could go play some games honestly, and probably come up with a much higher rating.

thx brah

I hate reading your posts.

On chess.com, my correspondence rating is in the 1900s, but my USCF rating is in the 1500s. Though I haven't played live in a while so I'm underrated there, but who knows by how much. Hmm, maybe I should enter this tournament...

I think you are likely to meet people playing on fake IDs, maybe that's even less hassle than sandbagging.

There's a reason why at open tournaments in the rest of the world the lower sections are low entry fee - low prize pool. Let the GMs play for the money, the rest plays for the fun and the competition. There are still open tournaments with several hundred participants overall. I'd much rather pay 60 € with no chance of getting anything back (-100% ROI) than $ 500 knowing that I have a very slim chance, but most of the time underrated juniors or sandbaggers take it (-50% ROI).

Big difference between chess.com correspondence ratings and chess.com blitz ratings though. I'm ~1800 correspondence, 1447 USCF (this number has gone up almost 200 points over my last 10 rated games, coming off of a decade of not playing anything rated, so it's probably lower than my "true" strength at this point...) but my chess.com blitz rating is only 1252. Though I haven't played much blitz there in a while... so maybe that's low too?

I think you can gain 200 points on chess.com correspondence (at least in the intermediary ranks) by not timing out and not getting banned.

Also your number of simultaneous games matters. I average 4-8 games at once. For a while my correspondence rating was the same as an expert (USCF ~2100) from my club. The difference? He was averaging about 250 games at a time. He's since cut back to about 75 games at once, and now his correspondence rating is up to 2000.

Of course the reason why playing more games at once affects your rating is you, on average, won't play as well in each individual game when trying to play more of them. So the "number of games" factor does not cause your correspondence rating to be "innacurate" in terms of reflecting how well you play chess.com correspondence game. It does, however, make your chess.com correspondence rating even less meaningful than many other online ratings in terms of predicting your OTB strength.

If you can get through the U2200 group of players in the U1600, hat's off to ya. You deserve that U1600 title!

Don't forget about the obscure European grandmasters with fake IDs. The sandbagging off the grid 2200-strength internet kid is a real hero if he can take that U1600 title. With so much attention on the U1600, I'm wondering if U1800 might not be the softer target.