American Cup Underway

Plus: Problems with the Candidates?

It has been a busy week, but I’ll do some catching up over the next few days, including at least one special post for subscribers. Meanwhile, here’s something a bit too quick to tide everyone over in the meantime.

First, the main purely chess news is that a major event is underway, the American Cup. Actually, it’s two events, or one event with two tournaments - I’m not sure there’s a way to cut nature at its joints on this one, so label as you’d like: there’s a men’s/open event/tournament and a women’s one too. We’ll keep an eye on the women’s event, but the focus will be on the “men’s”, which includes all the top U.S. players except for Hikaru Nakamura (presumably focused on Candidates prep as well as his principal occupation - streaming) and Hans Niemann (who was banned from the St. Louis Chess Club this year).

In keeping with recent tradition (to write oxymoronically), the tournament has an unusual format. The players contest a series of knockout matches, but as it’s double-elimination match losers have a chance to work their way back into contention for first. The match format is a bit odd as well: four-game matches consisting of a classical game and a rapid game on day 1, then the same on day 2 with colors reversed, followed by a blitz playoff if necessary.

The first matches have concluded - play started on Tuesday - with Fabiano Caruana going 2-0 against Grigory Oparin on the first day and winning the match 2.5-0.5 with a draw in the classical game on day 2. Levon Aronian and Sam Sevian drew both days’ classical and rapid games before Aronian prevailed 2-0 in the blitz tiebreak. Ray Robson lost the classical game to Leinier Dominguez on day 1, but then got revenge in the rapid, won the next classical game, and drew the second rapid game to win the match 2.5-1.5. Finally, Wesley So defeated Sam Shankland 2.5-0.5, drawing the first classical game before winning the first rapid game and the second classical contest.

The pairings for the second set of matches are Caruana-Aronian and Robson-So in the winners’ bracket, Oparin-Sevian and Dominguez-Shankland in the losers’ bracket.

---

Switching topics: A question. According to this podcast, which is now more than a week old, there were some visa problems possibly imperiling the Candidates, or at least their taking place in Toronto. Has anyone heard anything further about this?