Shulman & Zatonskih new US Champs
Yesterday, Yuri Shulman and Anna Zatonskih won the US Champship. A very quick draw was enough for Shulman to clinch his first title, but Zatonskih needed a tiebreak - video added!The championships were sponsored by IA Frank K. Berry and were held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The men's event was a 9-round Swiss with 24 players, and the women's championship was a 10-player round robin. 
The rate of play was 40 moves in one hour and fourty minutes (+30 seconds per move) plus half an hour to finish the game (also with 30 seconds per move added). The first prize was $13,000 but also included a Caribbean cruise deal. Yury Shulman was the lucky one, winning his first U.S. Championship title with a 7 /9 score. [TABLE=284]The subject remains topical: in the last round, the game played on board 1, Friedel-Shulman, ended in a draw after eleven moves. Quite understandable since Friedel needed half a point to score his third and last GM norm, while Shulman needed a draw to become the champion...Although he was happy with his first title of course, Shulman also regretted that some of the top players are not participating in the U.S. Championships, especially Kamsky. "He is playing for the World Championship, so we should do everything we can to get him in the U.S. Championship," Yury told Chess Life Online.Here are two impressive wins by Shulman:
In the women's championship, Irina Krush and Anna Zatonskih finished on shared first, and so a tiebreak was needed to decide the winner.[TABLE=286]Here are all five games of the truly thrilling tiebreak - it finally came down to an Armageddon game:
Yuri Shulman
Alexander Onischuk
Anna Zatonskih
Irina Krush- Official coverage by Monroi
- Coverage by Chess Life Online
- Games in PGN: men, women, tiebreak women
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Peter Doggers is Chess.com’s Senior Global Correspondent. Between 2007 and 2013, his website ChessVibes was a major source for chess news and videos, acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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