Wesley So Perfect On U.S. Championship Day 1
GM Wesley So leads the U.S. Championship as the only player to win his first three games. The tournament is a 12-player round-robin played online at a rapid time control.
The field of this year's championship has all of the American stars except for GM Fabiano Caruana, who was supposed to be in the last week of his preparation for the Candidates. As it has a faster time control and is played online, GM Hikaru Nakamura should be the favorite. He had a slow start: three draws on the first day.
The tournament leader was the first to admit that he had been fortunate in the first three rounds. "The quality of the games was not very high actually," said So, who was gifted half a point by GM Aleksandr Lenderman in the first round.
So outplayed GM Alejandro Ramirez in an endgame in round two, but his next game could have gone either way. "The last game was very topsy-turvy, as can be expected from this 3.f3 Caro-Kann," said So, who revealed that his preparation had consisted of playing 3+0 and 1+0 games!
Together with GM Ray Robson, GM Jeffery Xiong is tied for second place with 2.5 points. The world number-two junior player didn't need much extra practice as he's been active lately. He also played in the U.S. Junior Championship (where he lost to GM John Burke in an armageddon playoff) and in last Sunday's Speed Chess Invitational.
Xiong's round-three game with GM Dariusz Swiercz, a Polish grandmaster who has been playing for the U.S. since 2018, was interesting. The commentators stated that they had never seen a game before where, for several moves, there's a white pawn on g7 and a black pawn on g2 in a middlegame.
As it turned out, the databases have just one (!) other game with this situation, and it was played in the same opening variation. Truly something special.
U.S. Championship | Round 3 Standings
| # | Fed | Name | Rtg | Perf | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 0 | 1 | 2 | Pts | SB |
| 1 | So, Wesley | 2741 | 3339 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3.0/3 | |||||||||||
| 2 | Xiong, Jeffery | 2730 | 2831 | ½ | 1 | 1 | 2.5/3 | 1.5 | ||||||||||
| 3 | Robson, Ray | 2605 | 2807 | 1 | ½ | 1 | 2.5/3 | 1.5 | ||||||||||
| 4 | Sevian, Samuel | 2571 | 2875 | ½ | ½ | 1 | 2.0/3 | |||||||||||
| 5 | Nakamura, Hikaru | 2829 | 2667 | ½ | ½ | ½ | 1.5/3 | 2 | ||||||||||
| 6 | Moradiabadi, Elshan | 2566 | 2681 | ½ | ½ | ½ | 1.5/3 | 1.5 | ||||||||||
| 7 | Shankland, Sam | 2609 | 2514 | ½ | 0 | ½ | 1.0/3 | 2 | ||||||||||
| 8 | Swiercz, Dariusz | 2649 | 2502 | 0 | ½ | ½ | 1.0/3 | 1.75 | ||||||||||
| 9 | Ramirez, Alejandro | 2579 | 2543 | 0 | ½ | ½ | 1.0/3 | 1.75 | ||||||||||
| 10 | Dominguez, Leinier | 2786 | 2535 | 0 | ½ | ½ | 1.0/3 | 1.5 | ||||||||||
| 11 | Lenderman, Aleksandr | 2642 | 2596 | 0 | ½ | ½ | 1.0/3 | 1.25 | ||||||||||
| 12 | Liang, Awonder | 2397 | 1892 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.0/3 |
Games rounds 1-3
The 2020 U.S. Championship is played October 26-29 on lichess. It is a 12-player single round-robin with a time control of 25 minutes plus a five-second increment. The total prize fund is $150,000.
See also:
Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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