Chess.com and chesskid.com are sponsoring an online invitational this coming weekend for some of the USA's top juniors in the U12 and U8 divisions. There will be 8 kids in each section and they'll play a round robin at time controls of G/90 + 5 sec increment for the entire game. The games will be played on chess.com and they'll be providing analysis as well. Here's the link.

http://main.uschess.org/content/view/11761/319/

I'm particularly interested because in the U12 division there are 4 Dallas Chess Club kids (Jeffery Xiong, Jonathan Chiang, Tommy He, and Ruifeng Li) and I've lost to all 4 of them multiple times haha. I always pull for them so it'll be interesting to see how they fare.

I still can't believe how quickly Jeffery Xiong's rating has skyrocketed. Just about 1.5 years ago he was mid 2100's. To gain 250 points in a year and a half, especially at above the master level, is really something else.

DO the kids have to play in a public place...is there a US Chess rep there to make sure all is on the up and up?

I dont mind the online tourney and even if its rated as long as a US chess official is on hand at every participants locaton or a webcam is on every participant..

Yeah, they're going to have an arbiter there. As far as I know, they're going to all play in a room and the guy that runs the UTD chess program will be the one monitoring everything.

This makes me feel inferior in so many ways.

Will be good to follow.