Friday, March 27, 2009

2009 U.S. Chess Championships

Today I visited the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis website and saw a press release dated March 19, 2009, listing 23 of the 24 players invited to this year's championship. The 24th player will be the winner of an online tournament among the 2009 state chess champions hosted by and played on the ICC. The list of confirmed players includes IM Irina Krush and IM Anna Zatonskih. Here's a little information about the prize fund: The U.S. Championship, slated for May 7 - 17, will offer a purse of up to $200,000 in prize money, including a $35,000 cash prize for the first-place winner and a $5,000 jackpot prize. If the winner scores a 9-0 sweep, the player will also be awarded the Fischer Memorial Prize, a $64,000 bonus. The prize is in remembrance of world champion Bobby Fischer, who died last year. I don't recall reading about the $64,000 bonus Fischer Memorial Prize before. I consider it more likely than not that no player will score 9-0 to claim this prize but it certainly is a great incentive for fighting chess! Monroi.com has a website for the 2009 Championship, so I assume it will be broadcasting the games. At present, I haven't found more details about the prize structure. I'd like to know what the break-down is for the 24. I'll keep looking.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you planning on covering the US Championship anymore?

I was excited to see that Jennifer Shahade just posted Fantasy Chess for the 09 Championship: http://uschess.org/fc_2009/

Also, I found a Twitter account for the St. Louis Chess Club/US Championship: http://twitter.com/ccscsl

My email is: biojared@yahoo.com
Thanks!

Jan said...

Hi biojared,

Oh yes, we will be giving extensive coverage to the 2009 U.S. Women's Chess Championship. It's the premiere event in the USA for female chessplayers. In many cases, it's the only "women's chess" that some chess dudes pay attention to, so it's doubly important from our perspective to give the Women's Championship as much coverage as we can. We will make the time to do as good as job of coverage as we can.

Jan

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