ChessTV -- POB Topic 3: U.S. Open Yay or Nay?

Another good topic we talked about in yesterday's Chess.com TV Show, "Pardon Our Blunders" was whether or not the U.S. Open should have qualifying slot(s) for the U.S. Championship...

Basically, is it right to give such an important "honor" to such an "un-important" event? Now, the U.S. Open "sounds" important (like in Tennis and Golf), but when the majority of the strong and ambitious players in the "American Chess Circuit" consider the U.S. Open an afterthought (because of its bad format and weak prize fund) -- Is it really right for the USCF to try and coax all of us to this event with a "cookie" instead of actually fixing the tournament???

my answer was obviously not

fix the tournament by fixing it, not by taking away from a better event!!

You said the strong/ambitious US players consider it an afterthought then said "The best players in America play."  ? So they drag themselves to it because it's history but to a pro (or pro hopeful) all important tournaments happen in Europe?

edit, oh I see, I misread it, US open and US champ are different tourneys

What is bad about the format, I admit I don't know anything about it, just curious.

It should be a good enough tournament so that the winner deserves a slot.

How do you get a more competitive field though? Where are the strong American players that aren't playing in the US Champs? Unless you're saying they need to somehow pull Seirawan back (good luck with that), I don't know what you actually want them to do towards this end. The players that will make the event more competitive/prestigious simply don't exist. We should make them exist, I agree, but that's a different problem altogether. Hopefully initiatives such as the US Chess School will help with that in the future, but there's nothing to be done to make it immediately such a strong/competitive/prestigious tourney.

As for the US Open, I have to agree with IM Pruess. There are several problems with this plan, at least if the open is constituted as it currently is. First of all, you've got the problem of hte field. Your big contenders are going to play an A player, a few experts, an NM or two, maybe an FM and a couple other IM/GMs. Basically the tournament has a couple people knocked out by upsets, but other than that, it's fairly well a crapshoot over a few important rounds, with tons and tons of ties.

Furthermore, you have like 3 different schedules, each one with, quite possibly, very different levels of competition. This doesn't matter SO much because the sections merge by the time you hit the last couple rounds (i.e. the ones which matter), but on the other hand, it's still a quite big discrepancy in ease of the road to the championships.

Finally, there are so many foreigners in this US Champ qualifier that things can really get spun out of whack. Case in point: last year, one IM Daniel Rensch lost to Polish IM Jacek Stopa in the last round, knocking him out of contention for a qualifying spot. If you look at this year, the leader is GM Ramirez of Costa Rica. Obviously these foreigners can't win the qualifying spots, but they still have a huge impact on the tournament, often winning it, and, of course, a large number of the foreigners are titled, and a large number of the titled players are foreign.

Until they do some major fixing of the tournament and its problems, there shouldn't be qualifying spots. Papa Bear, I hate to say it, but I think you're biased here by your ability to use the Open as a chance to get in to the Championships. In the broadcast, when IM Pruess brought up the fact that there were 5 spots last year, you said something along the lines of "Yeah, but that almost let me qualify" and brought up the Stopa loss. Basically, it's hard for you to call something bad/wrong when it benefits you, but that doesn't make it right. If they had a spot for the strongest player named "Daniel Rensch", this would obviously be a bad thing for the tournament and US Chess - apart from the fact that any tourney with Danny is a better tournament, of course ;) - and if they had a spot for some kind of strongest non-titled player or something that would give me a shot (although I'd need more than that), I would love it, but at the same time I would realize that it's not the right way to do things.

I say all of this being an acquaintance of several strong players in the tournament that's currently going on as well as knowing fairly well a previous winner of the event.

wandering makes a good point that the person who qualifies for the us champs will be determined by only 2 games against im or gm competition at the very end. and even then, it'll quite likely be a tie and therefore determined by tiebreaks, which is a real crapshoot, because then it comes down to a question of whose 1700 and 1900 opponents from the first couple rounds scored 2/9 vs. 5/9 (makes a much bigger difference than the tiebreaks of many of your stronger opponents, which i would still consider not a very satisfactory determinant anyway).

i qualified for the us champs one year bc i happened to get white against a gm in round 8 and he played a modern opening. i was not in the lead for a post, and there were tons of ppl with a chance at that point. i smashed his bad opening, got black in the last round against an unambitious im who made a draw quickly by trading all the pieces. and then qualified (probably on tiebreak, don't remember). but basically, i had a 2-game tournament of which one game was hardly a game (the draw). did not feel i had earned anything!

The truth is that the US Open "is what it is"... as the cliche goes... I did lose last year, costing me a spot, against IM Jacek Stopa of Poland, but it isn't like I was a "victim" in this situation.

I agree with Brasmus though, once the filed of the US Championship is a truly elite event (like 6-9 players in the top 20 in the world) then it would make more sense to crack down on these qualification spots. Otherwise, and until then, what is the point???

i think the current players in the us champs are plenty elite, and there is a sense in making that event as good as possible. are you really expecting a country to have 6-9 players in the world top 20??? and only then take their natl championship seriously? i take the california state championship seriously!!

To be fair, Russia has 6 right now, and this feels a bit low to me, though that may be because I'm thinking back to the soviet days. On the other hand, clearly not all of THEM take even the super-final seriously - I'm looking at you, Vladimir Kramnik. At that point you might have the reverse problem - when I'm playing for the world championship, how important is my country's?

Nice punch-line!

Carlsen always struck me as somthing of a doofus, and now I know it's because he's a 90s kid.  Eye-opening.

i have no issue with the strength of the qualifiers from the us open, but rather with the qualifying process, as i think i've explained above. it's too random. beyond that, my main argument has always been that they should not use the US Champs as an incentive to try to get professional players to play in an event that they would not otherwise play in. if they want good players to go to the us open, they should make it a better tournament for them.

i'm perfectly happy to see low rated players qualify for the us champs. but if it's done through something like the qualifier they put on in tulsa 2-3 years ago.

Very good points... You can't have the US Open essentially serve as a vacation for most chess players and still expect that level of "prestige" that should qualify a US Champs qualifier...