The American Cup is an exciting new double-elimination knockout tournament brought to us by the folks at the Saint Louis Chess Club. The action will take place from April 20-29 at the Saint Louis Chess Club and can be viewed live at USChessChamps.com.
I am honored to have been asked to be Chief Arbiter and working alongside me will be IA Brian Yang, who is a very experienced and capable arbiter.
Yesterday, we held a players meeting to discuss the new format and go over any special rules. The main topics covered were the no draws by agreement rule, time controls, which differ based on whether you’re in the Championship Bracket or in the Elimination Bracket, understanding the format of the event and the drawing of colors for the pairings.
As you can imagine, most of it was self explanatory except for explaining the format. My own paraphrased understanding was that if you lose a standard time control match, and a rapid time control match, then you’re knocked out. Anyone who doesn’t do that would be the Champion. However, thanks to that way of thinking, it caused some fun on-the-fly research regarding the format and it turns out that is not entirely accurate as it is possible to not lose a rapid time control match and still not win the tournament. I’ll let you work out how for yourself how that can happen!
Anyway, one major point that was clarified was that Match 14 in the pairings brackets (the winner of the Championship Bracket versus the winner of the Elimination Bracket) is played at a classical time control and then if Match 15 is necessary, that will be played at a rapid time control.
No draws by agreement is always fun, but makes life fairly simplistic from an arbiter perspective, and the drawing for colors turned out to provide an easy method for pairing all the matches in the event. We invited the top seeds for both groups, in this case Levon Aronian and Irina Krush, to choose from a white and black pawn that I hid in my hands. Both players managed to guess the location of the white pawn meaning the higher seed in every match, both the Championship and Elimination brackets, starts game 1 with the white pieces.
For those wondering about the seeding order for Nemcova and Tokhirjonova, who have the same April standard FIDE rating, they have been ordered alphabetically by last name, so Nemcova is seed #4 and Tokhirjonova is seed #5.
If a playoff is necessary, the lower seed will have the white pieces in game 1 and then if an Armageddon game is necessary, the lower seed will “call” the coin toss, with the winner of the toss choosing whether to take the white pieces or black pieces in the Armageddon. The players also all unanimously agreed to add an increment from move 61 onwards for the Armageddon games so the time control for those will be 5-minutes for White, 4-minutes for Black, with a 2-second increment in effect from move 61 onwards. Thank you players!
Other brief topics included the security/fair play procedures, on-site spectators being allowed (yay, welcome back!) and the appeals procedure/committee information, though fingers crossed we won’t have need for that.
I believe we were timed at completing all the above, including the usual welcome and introduction by Tony Rich from the Club, at 21 minutes total, which scored us a couple of bonus points as all the players were able to head to the welcome dinner earlier than planned.
Now we move onto the main event starting Wednesday, April 20. Games will start at 1pm local time (Central Daylight Time: CDT) and we’re all eager to get the action started. See you all soon!