Four on the Floor as Final Day of U.S. Open Begins

Four Lead with U.S. Championship Spot on the Line

Oparin (L) against Bilovil with Zhou in the background. (Photo by David Llada)

Our week in the Great Lakes State comes to a close today as the final round of the 126^th U.S. Open begins at 3 p.m. EDT.

A spot in this October’s U.S. Championship is on the line for the highest-finishing American player, and four players enter Round 9 tied for first with 7/8 scores: GM Grigoriy Oparin (MO), GM Christopher Yoo (CA), IM Jason Liang (OH), and IM Bohdan Bilovil (TX).

All the leaders except Bilovil are eligible for this spot. Bilovil currently attends Texas Tech University, but he is registered with the Ukrainian federation.

In the event of draws on the top two boards today, 11 players with 6½/8 scores will have a shot of catching the leaders with a win in. While 13 players are currently tied for fifth, two of them — Julian Proleiko (MO) and Landon Meadors (GA) — have requested half-point byes for this afternoon.

WGM Sabina Foisor will be streaming the final round on the US Chess Twitch Channel, and she has curated the positions and games analyzed in today’s report from the U.S. Open. Games from the Blitz are annotated by JJ Lang.

U.S. Open

In the battle of the co-leaders, Bilovil navigated his white pieces into a relatively tame line of the Exchange Variation against Oparin’s Queen’s Gambit Declined. Oparin seemed content with the result, as he still had well over an hour on his clock when the game ended on move 33. Bilovil was down to ten minutes, but he was unable to find inroads into Oparin’s defense.

The next five boards featured match-ups between players with a chance to catch the leaders, but Yoo and Liang were the only players who managed to win.

As White against Nathaniel Phillip Moor (CT), Yoo employed Short Variation against Moor’s Caro-Kann and looked to be on his way to a smooth victory out of the opening.

Instead, Yoo made the wrong decision about how to trade queens, giving Moor ample counterplay. But one error from Moor before the time control was enough for Yoo to take over for a second time.

With the black pieces against FM Vaibhav Kalpaka (VA), Liang also employed the Queen’s Gambit Declined. But a few slow moves from White saw Liang gain a space advantage in the center and pick up activity and momentum from there.

Despite featuring a material imbalance for most of the game, IM Julian Colville (CA) displayed excellent defensive skill with his rooks against GM Jianchao Zhou (MA)’s rook and two minor pieces. After 71 moves and using all of his time, Zhou finally acquiesced to the draw.

The game between GM Rahul Srivatshav Peddi (TX) and FM Seth Homa (FM) was the definition of a three result game. Homa’s King’s Indian Defense took on a Benoni flavor, and once Peddi committed to a plan of attacking on the kingside, Homa looked poised to punish White’s over-extended center. Instead, a series of remarkable temporary sacrifices shortly before the time control put Peddi in the driver’s seat. But Peddi was unable to find the best follow-ups with seconds remaining on his clock, allowing Homa to neutralize the attack by move 40.

Finally, GM Richard Bitoon (NV) was unable to get any chances as Black against Landon Meadors (GA), and the breakout star of the Rockefeller was happy to take the draw against the Irwin stalwart.

The top players who finish in (or tied for) the top eight will earn cash prizes, as will the top four finishers (and those tied for a top-four spot) for each of the six rating classes from Master (2200-2399) down to Class D (1200-1399), as well as for rated players below 1200 and for the top three unrated players. The full prize breakdown is available here.

Side Events

GM Christopher Yoo won the U.S. Open Blitz with a 12½/14 score, pocketing $400. Over the course of four hours and seven double-rounds of three-minute blitz (with a two-second increment starting on move one), Yoo routinely finished his games with more than two minutes on the clock.

Thanks to the work of US Chess Ratings Manager Danial Wilson, the top boards of the blitz were broadcast live on DGT boards, too.

Yoo entered the last round a half-point behind Colville but won both games in their last-round encounter. The second win was particularly compelling:

Artemii Khanbutaev — Illinois’s Barber representative — finished clear second with 11½/14 by dispatching his Illinois elder FM Avi Kaplan 2–0 in the last round, netting $200 as a result.

Kaplan ended his tournament on a four-game skid (also losing both games against Colville in Round 6) after roaring out to a 9½/10 start that included a win against Yoo:

Colville finished tied for third with 11/14 alongside FM Hersh Singh (WI), FM Stephen Willy (WA), and Julian Joseph (TX). Joseph won the $200 prize for the top finisher rated under 2200, while the other three players each won $50 for their shares of third place. Joseph also earned the unofficial honor of “most terrifying possible pairing in blitz” after the Barber rep also won the 1800-2099 section of the Weeramantry Blitz.

The first two rounds of the Weekend Swiss are also in the books, with the first of today’s three game-in-60 (with a five-second delay) games currently underway. Manis Davidovich (MI) is the highest rated of the 10 players with 2/2 scores. The group also includes Elijah Logozar (MO), who has been competing all week in quads, and Gaofei Wang (IL), who this author can confirm is a very dangerous player.

Davidovich’s absolutely wild second-round win against Will Osborne (NE) is included below. The games for this tournament are not being broadcast online, but please email me at Click here to show email address if you played any games from this tournament that you believe are worthy of publication. This one sets the bar pretty high, though:

And more!

Move over, “cellar door.” There is no two-word phrase in the English language more beautiful than “meeting adjourned.”

Over 100 state delegates discussed motions for seven hours yesterday, not including a one-hour lunch break. Although the schedule budgets a second day for this meeting, this year everybody managed to work together to get through the entire agenda in one day!

Following the Executive Board’s closed session this morning, the governance portion of the event concludes at 2 p.m. with the Executive Board Open Session in Ambassador’s Ballroom. A full schedule of the day’s events is available here.