The $175,000 United States championship reaches its final rounds at St Louis this weekend, and can be viewed live and free online (7pm start). Two world top 10 players plus a 14-year-old prodigy who has been compared to Bobby Fischer are competing, and the event is also part of a grandiose plan to transform the US into the global top chess dog ahead of its ancient rival Russia and the new challengers from China and India.
Rex Sinquefield, billionaire and investment guru, is the mastermind developing this ambitious strategy. His hero is Fischer, who famously seized the world crown from the old Soviet Union, and his home town St Louis, with its chess club open daily and its giant 15 foot high king in the city centre, has become the epicentre of US chess in the way that Moscow’s Central Chess Club was for the USSR in the 1950s.
The prize fund for which America’s best 12 grandmasters are battling this week is by far the largest for any national title contest. St Louis also hosts the annual Sinquefield Cup where the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, takes part, as well as special tournaments for women and juniors.
Hikaru Nakamura, 27, the favourite, was the clear championship leader with three round left. The increased opportunities sparked by Sinquefield’s largesse have raised his game from elite GM to No3 in the world on the live ratings. Nakamura’s dreams of a match for the world title in St Louis are only tempered by his terrible one-to-one score against Carlsen and his current struggle to secure one of the eight qualifying spots in the 2016 candidates which will determine the Norwegian’s next challenger.
The ex-Filipino Wesley So, 21, switched nationality and allegiance to the US in 2014 to further his career and jumped into the top 10. He has been uneven in St Louis, losing to 14-year-old Samuel Sevian, who receives coaching from Garry Kasparov and whose career so far looks the real deal, matching the all-time best teenage performances. However, he was lucky against So, who got a crushing position early on but spoilt what should have been a decisive attack on Sevian’s king.
The ace for Sinquefield’s strategy would be to persuade Fabiano Caruana, Italy’s world No2, who was raised in New York and has dual citizenship, to follow So and transfer to the US. That would make America’s five-man Olympiad squad serious gold medal contenders at the biennial 170-nation Olympiad which the old USSR used to dominate and which China won in 2014. But so far Caruana has stayed put, and even had a special meeting with the Italian Olympic Committee to discuss how they could help him.
3385 1 Kh3?? g5! 2 Rd6 (to stop Qh6 mate) g4+ 3 Kh4 Nf5+ 4 Kg5 wins a rook.
