2017 American Champion?

Last week’s poll asked ‘Has your rating gone up or down since a year ago?’ The ‘almost unchanged’ answer was unsurprisingly most common, but when you add up the other answers you see 87 gained significantly, while 79 went down significantly. And the big gainers (up over 80 points) are an impressive 10% of the vote (I know it says 9% below, but that’s because the poll software decided to round 9.963% down to 9%). So not bad at all, especially as I suspect that many blog readers here are not young kids who might expect their ratings to increase naturally.

But compare the real results on rating changes with a poll question from the start of 2016: ‘Do you think your rating will go up or down in 2016?’ The optimists vastly outnumbered the pessimists.

Next week the US Championship starts in its now traditional location in St Louis. With 3 of the top 6 players in the world competing – So, Caruana and Nakamura – I find the US Championship the most interesting national championship in the world. The strength in depth is also there, with Kamsky, Robson, Shankland, Onischuk and Xiong in the 12-player event. If So has a ridiculously brilliant tournament he could challenge Carlsen’s World Number 1 position, as the gap is 16 Elo points. But my question is: Who will win the 2017 US Championship?

3 thoughts on “2017 American Champion?”

  1. Today’s broadcast of US Women Championship Final Round at ~3:17:00, we have WGM Sabina-Francesca Foisor thanking her coach for making her do calculation practice prior to the Championship and due to those exercises, she saw …Rf6 leading to Queen sac and mate (avoiding …Bh3) and winning (almost, as she had to wait for the result of Paikidze-Yu) the US Champs, which was all the more sweeter as she played it in the memory off her mother who died in January.
    I think we all know who the coach is …….

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