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This years U.S. Junior Championship, Girls Junior Championship, and Senior Championship all kick off Tuesday, July 16, at the Saint Louis Chess Club (SLCC). Stay tuned to Chess Life Online for round-by-round coverage, featuring annotated games and highlights, of each round. Read on below to see what to expect from this years tournaments.

Image Caption

courtesy SLCC / Austin Fuller

There will be a new U.S. Junior Champion by the end of July, with last years winner GM Abhimanyu Mishra opting not to defend his title. Of this years competitors, only GM Christopher Yoo has previously won the tournament (back in 2022), with several runners-up also joining this veteran group of juniors.

Indeed, eight of this years competitors are at least 16 years of age, and six of those eight have played in at least one previous U.S. Junior Championship. In descending order of rating, GM Andrew Hong (19) looks to improve on consecutive second-place finishes and reigning Denker champion GM Arthur Guo also looks to improve on his share of second from last year.

IM Justin Wang is tied with Yoo and Hong for most previous appearances in this tournament, but has never finished above a tie for sixth place. Rounding out the top half is IM (and GM-Elect) Andy Woodward, one of the two 14-year-olds making his debut this year.

GM Balaji Daggupati may be seeded sixth by rating, but also earned a share of second last year (and a share of fourth in 2022). Qualifying for the first time, on rating, is IM Jason Wang (17), and Jason Liang (16) returns after last years debut.

The final two players are the other 14-year-old IM Brewington Hardaway and the 2023 U.S. Junior Open champion, Nicholas Ladan.

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U.S. Girls' Junior champ Alice Lee is interviewed by WGM Begim Tokhirjonova after her victory (courtesy Crystal Fuller/SLCC)

The big question for the U.S. Junior Girls Championship is whether anybody can catch last years champ, IM Alice Lee. The 14-year-old is certainly a veteran of this event, oxymoronic as it may sound: this is her fifth consecutive appearance in the invitational. Indeed, only two players are older than her in this years youthful field, as well!

Following the top seed (by rating), is 15-year-old FM Zoey Tang. Tang is appearing in this tournament for the third straight year, and is looking to improve on her share of third place in 2023 and strong showing in the U.S. Cadet Championship earlier this summer.

14-year-olds WIM Iris Mou and FM Rose Atwell follow Tang on the ratings list, and are the only other two returning competitors in this years field. Mou finished in clear fifth place, while Atwell finished tenth and will occupy a much different role as one of the older and higher-rated girls in this years field.

The six newcomers are: Jasmine Su, WFM Yassamin Ehsani, WFM Megan Paragua, WIM Omya Vidyarthi, and wildcard WFM Chloe Gaw. At 19 years old, Ehsani is the oldest competitor in the field by four years! Paragua, in contrast, is the only pre-teen in attendance, clocking in at the age of 11.

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The last man anybody wants to see across from the board right now: Melikset Khachiyan (courtesy Lennart Ootes/SLCC)

The roster for the U.S. Senior Championship shares more than a bit of overlap with the official delegation for the 2024 FIDE World Senior Team Championship. Four of this years gold medalists are picking up in St. Louis less than a week after their tournament in Krakow concluded.

Among them is the defending U.S. Senior Champion GM Melikset Khachiyan alongside GMs Igor Novikov and Alexander Shabalov. Also in this years field is GM Gregory Kaidanov, who was a part of the 2023 FIDE World Senior Team gold medalist squad, as well as GM Vladimir Akopian, who was planning to travel to Krakow before last-minute logistical issues.

Other familiar names include the return of GM Larry Christiansen, who sat out in 2023, but returns for his fifth championship. If that sounds like a lot, it turns out that GM Joel Benjamin is one of four participants playing in his sixth championship. Considering this event is only in its sixth iteration, thats quite an accomplishment for Benjamin (and Kaidanov, Novikov, and Shabalov).

The three remaining players are the relative newcomers, with only IM Douglas Root (2023) previously appearing in this event. The two debutants are GM Jesse Kraai (the 2023 U.S. Senior Open Champion) and wildcard GM Julio Becerra.

Quick Links:

Follow our coverage of the 2024 National Championships Official Website Replay all games onChess.com:Senior (link coming soon) /Girls' Junior/Junior Replay all games onLichess.org:Senior/Girls' Junior/Junior (links coming soon) Follow live commentary with GM Yasser Seirawan, GM Christian Chirila, and IM Nazi Paikidze on Twitch or YouTube

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2024 U.S. Junior, Girls' Junior, and Senior Championship Preview - uschess.org

ACCENTUS Chess960: Victory for Pragg and Donchenko

Press release by the Biel Chess Festival

The participants of the GMT Masters and Challengers tournaments played the one-day ACCENTUS Chess960 tournament on Saturday. In this variation, the positions of the pieces in the first row are drawn by lot, so the starting position for the players is different from what they are used to. This tournament is not part of the Grandmasters' Triathlon, but its result is still important: in the event of a tie at the end of the GMT Triathlon, the positions in the standings of the ACCENTUS Chess960 serve as a tie-breaker.

Among the players in the GMT-Masters, the top seeded Indian Praggnanandhaa, known as "Pragg", lived up to his role as favourite by winning the Chess960 tournament with 5/7 points.

Among the GMT-Challengers, Alexander Donchenko prevailed in impressive fashion: he remained unbeaten and won with 5 out of 7 points.

Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu

Kick-off to the flagship event of the Biel Chess Festival, the Grandmaster Tournament (GMT)!

This year, it is divided into the GMT-Masters and the GMT-Challengers. The first discipline on the programme was rapid chess. Haik Martirosyan from Armenia proved to be the strongest rapid player, ahead of the Chess960 winner, Praggnanandhaa. Vincent Keymer and L Quang Liem finished level on points with the Indian grandmaster.

As in Chess960, Alexander Donchenko leads the GMT-Challengers ranking. Saleh Salem is the German's closest chaser after the first day of the Triathlon.

An open one-day rapid tournament with 143 participants took place simultaneously in Biel. It was won by Mukhiddin Madaminov from Uzbekistan.

Alexander Donchenko

As in previous years, the Grandmaster Tournament is organised as a triathlon, a mixture of games in different formats: classical, rapid and blitz. In this year's edition, a GMT-Masters and a GMT-Challengers are taking place simultaneously.

In the GMT-Masters, Haik Martirosyan showed that he is a force to be reckoned with in the rapid disciplines. He started the tournament with two wins against Sam Shankland and Vincent Keymer both with the black pieces and was not defeated in the following rounds either. If the Armenian can continue at this level in the slower, classical games, which count more heavily in the scoring, he will be a favourite to take the title. His closest chasers are Praggnanandhaa, Keymer and last year's winner L.

Alexander Donchenko lived up to his role as favourite in the GMT-Challengers: after the rapid games, he leads the tournament table with a one-point lead over Emirati Saleh Salem and stands two points ahead of over Jonas Bjerre and Vaishali Rameshbabu.

Master Class Vol.17 - Boris Spassky

In this video course, experts including Dorian Rogozenco, Mihail Marin, Karsten Mller and Oliver Reeh, examine the games of Boris Spassky. Let them show you which openings Spassky chose to play, where his strength in middlegames were and much more.

Continue reading here:
Biel Festival: Martirosyan and Donchenko the strongest in the rapid - Chess News | ChessBase

One of the quiet joys of being a restaurant pastry chef is that you arrive early, typically before anyone else, probably just an hour or two after the last of the line cooks are done scrubbing and sanitizing the splashbacks and lowboys. The room invariably still smells like degreaser and leftover wine, no matter how immaculate. That is, at least until you pop your first espresso shot, then a third and a fourth. Here you make yourself a kind of force field. You get to take time to enjoy the kind of inspiration that being alone in a giant kitchen full of your tools and favorite recipes might bring.

On those mornings, I would use my early arrival as a chance to thumb through my cookbooks. Some of these books were by renowned pastry chefs, but a majority were castoffs from rummage sales and free bins at the library. They were full of recipes that people once exchanged verbally before eventually typing them up and binding them with plastic spirals. In these volumes, I found inspiration and personal stories and often scrap papers with handwritten recipes tucked among the pages.

Then I would get to work on my own recipes. I would roll out a dozen or two pie shells to pop in a freezer and begin my near-daily dance with buttermilk chess pies, where I would be at the center of a carefully choreographed performance of whisking, filling, baking, rotating, cooling.

While it was a very simple recipe, I had, without knowing it, created quite an art of the thing. Timing was essential: never missing a step, never letting my timer outsmart my sense of smell, never letting a young baker crack the door too soon to check the wiggle. I aimed for nothing less than a particular type of perfection with that pie. I knew it, and it knew me. It wasnt quite right unless the crackle appeared on top, the edges were flaky and tender and the bottom was both crisp and soft.

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The Pie Ill Never Shut Up About - The New York Times

Beating a grandmaster, should you manage it, is obviously a huge milestone for any chess player. These days youngsters are beating grandmasters at younger and younger ages with the current record being just eight years old. At 39 years old though, I had yet to beat a grandmaster in the most prestigious format - OTB Classical Chess. A handful of draws and some wins against International Masters were previously my peak OTB results.

In the 2024 Carolinas Classic, I managed to break through and score a win against GM Julio Sadorra. Not only did I manage to eke out the victory, I managed to do it in fantastic fashion, winning a Sicilian sacrificial assault that is easily one of my best games ever.

I already analyzed the game in @JulesGambit's excellent recap of the event, but here also is my video recap of the game.

GM Sadorra was incredibly kind and genuine after the game, laughing as he extended in his hand in resignation, and chatting about the game, UT Dallas, and our families. I wish him all the best in his coaching career at UT Dallas and am honored to have had the chance to play him.

I was inspired in the game by the game Mikhail Tal vs. Bent Larsen from 1965. I've always enjoyed this game. It's one of my absolute favorite Mikhail Tal games. When deliberating over 14.Nf5!?, I recalled the game and the nature of the sacrifice, finding enough similarities to give me confidence that my sacrifice should work as well.

Thanks to the Charlotte Chess Center for a great event, and I hope to have more chances to compete again soon!

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I Beat A Grandmaster In Classical Chess For The 1st Time! - Chess.com

GM Fabiano Caruana won the 2024 SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz Croatia with five rounds to spare. Scoring a total of 27 points across the five days, he matched GM Magnus Carlsen's record from 2019 of most points earned in a Grand Chess Tour rapid and blitz event.

GMs Wesley So, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and Alireza Firouzja fought fiercely for the second spot in the remaining rounds but ended up scoring 23 points each for a large tie.

The GCT will conclude back home in St. Louis with the Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz on August 10-17 and the Sinquefield Cup on August 17-31.

SuperUnited Croatia Rapid & Blitz Final Standings

To say Caruana was a "clear favorite," going into the final day 4.5 points ahead of the field, is an understatement. At the award ceremony, he said: "The last day was mostly about chasing Magnus' record, which I almost managed, but I realized at some point it's just so difficult. I mean, to collect points when everyone wants to beat you is really tough."

The day started with a comical moment as GM Anish Giri arrived late, just after the ceremonial first moves had been made. He came right in time to look like he was the last guest, on his own board against GM Vidit Gujrathi:

That game, between friends, ended almost instantly in a draw, by the way. But let's jump into the rest of the action.

The tournament continued to play out like a dream for the tournament leader. He clinched it by winning his first three games and drawing the fourth. While he played out the rest of the rounds, he'd already won the $40,000 prize and 13 GCT points.

GM Ian Nepomniachtchi (who celebrated his 34th birthday) suffered his fourth loss in a row (carried over from the previous day) in Sunday's first round, against Caruana. In the opening, Nepomniachtchi sacrificed his knight on g5 with the classic "fishing pole trap" theme, but when he blitzed out 22.e6??, Caruana realized this time the knight really was hanging.

Once again with the black pieces (as he had started the tournament with White twice), Caruana won a full piece in the middlegame again, this time against GM Gukesh Dommaraju by Putting Pressure on the Pinned Piece (PP on the PP).

Caruana was in trouble against Vidit, who achieved a winning position with the two knights against two bishops. But when the Indian GM struggled to find the right way to push the passed pawn, the position swung around and Caruana won the endgame with a great bishop and active king:

With a draw in Sunday's fourth round against Saric, Caruana officially won the tournament. As often happens, after he'd already clinched the title, he lost three games in the second half of the dayand scoring just a half-point more would have broken Carlsen's record.

Still, his final victory against GM Levon Aronian allowed him to match the record with 27 points. It was a crushing win in the Benoni Defense, which Caruana converted with great speed and accuracy. GM Rafael Leitao goes over the full game below.

In a sense, the fight for second place was the greatest intrigue on the final day, as a handful of players were in the running to earn the $30,000 prize. By the time Caruana won the tournament, Firouzja and Vachier-Lagrave were on 19 points and So was on 18.5, and these three were the main contenders for the rest of the tournament.

Vachier-Lagrave's victory against Aronian in Sunday's fifth game was a close contender for Game of the Day. GM Garry Kasparov called the French number-two a "fish in water" when allowed to attack, and the black king was "easy prey for the white pieces" after 19.Rxe6!!, a move that the former world champion spotted instantly himself.

Firouzja was the first player to defeat Caruana, in the fifth round, but he needed a bit of luck in the final round to win on demand against GM Ivan Saric. The Croatian GM overlooked a basic tactic when he played14.e5?. Can you follow in Firouzja's footsteps from Black's side?

Meanwhile, in the sixth round So played the swindle of the day against Vidit, winning a position that most people would consider to be somewhere between "dead lost" and "resignable" for Black.

Nepomniachtchi and Aronian funnily both played a Sicilian Wing Gambit in the same round (respectively, against Saric and against Giri), but their scores from the previous days left them too far behind. Nepomniachtchi also had the last laugh in his saga with So from the previous day:

Gukesh, Giri, Vidit, and Saric rounded out the field at the bottom. It was a painful showing for the Indian challenger in the 2024 FIDE World Championship, but it's not nearly the end of the world. The match, four months away, will be played with a classical time control and not rapid and blitz (excluding tiebreaks).

Caruana leads the Grand Chess Tour ahead of the two final events.

Grand Chess Tour Founder Kasparov joined the broadcast to share his thoughts on several topics.

About Caruana's incredible achievement, he said: "He was definitely the dominant force in Bucharest and, also, to the surprise of many... now his dominance is absolute." About Firouzja, he saw great potential but, "his big weakness is complicated endgames... it remains one of his Achilles heels."

Kasparov admitted that rapid and blitz may become relevant in the upcoming world championship if it reaches tiebreaks, but that it's first and foremost a classical event. At the same time, he made a statement that received more backlash than agreement in the comments on X:

He also revealed that in 2025 the GCT Finals will feature the top four players, with the details of format and qualification still being worked out. This year, the GCT will conclude in St. Louis next month.

How to review?

The 2024 SuperUnited Croatia Rapid & Blitz is the third event of the 2024 Grand Chess Tour and ran July 10-14 in the Westin Hotel in Zagreb, Croatia. The 10 players first competed in a single rapid round-robin with a time control of 25 minutes plus a 10-second increment per move that was followed by a blitz double round-robin with a 5+2 time control.

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Caruana Wins With 5 Rounds To Spare, Matches Carlsen's Record Of 27 Points - Chess.com