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The Saint Louis Chess Club hosted the annual national championships for junior players, and a newly formed championship for seniors, both held concurrently from July 11th to 20th.
Each tournament was a classical 10-player round-robin invitational. Players received 90 minutes for the first 40 moves followed by 30 minutes for the rest of the game plus a 30-second bonus per move starting from move one.
The U.S. Junior Championship is hosted in St. Louis for the tenth consecutive year in 2019 and features a prize fund of over $20,000 plus a $10,000 college scholarship to the winner, funded by the Dewain Barber Foundation and US Chess.
Top seed Awonder Liang and third seed Nicolas Checa drew their final round games to finish the event on 7 out of 9, which meant rapid tiebreaks would decide the 2019 Junior Championship. Liang won both encounters after getting great position out of the opening with both colours. This was Liang's third straight victory in the top national tournament for players under the age of 21 — the youngster from Madison, Wisconsin is still 16 years old.
Awonder Liang | Photo: Austin Fuller / CCSCSL
This is the first edition of the invitational U.S. Senior Championship, and follows on the heels of the longer running U.S. Senior Open which was won by GM Dmitry Gurevich at the end of June. Gurevich is not in the field at the U.S. Senior Championship, but there are many familiar names from U.S. Championships in the recent past, such as Larry Christiansen, Alex Yermolinsky, Gregory Kaidanov, Joel Benjamin and Alexander Shabalov.
Four-time US Champion Shabalov (51 years old) finished clear first after having an undefeated 'plus three' performance, beating Dlugy, Novikov and Fishbein and drawing the rest of his games. Gregory Kaidanov and Alexander Goldin shared second place on 5 out of 9.
Alexander Shabalov | Photo: Crystal Fuller / CCSCSL
The Girls Championship features top young female players from 19 to as young as nine years old!
Rating favourite and defending champion Carissa Yip impressed with a 7½ score, but such astounding performance did not mean she had it easy, as she was on the worse side of a draw in her final round encounter against Emily Nguyen and second-placed Rochelle Wu got a win with Black to finish just a half point behind. Ruiyang Yan got third place on 6 out of 9.
Carissa Yip | Photo: Austin Fuller / CCSCSL
