US Chess Championship

The U.S. Chess Championship is an invitational tournament held to determine the national chess champion of the United States. Begun as a challenge match in 1845, the U.S. Championship has been decided by tournament play for most of its long history (Soltis, 2012). Since 1936, it has been held under the auspices of the U.S. Chess Federation. Until 1999, the event consisted of a round-robin tournament of varying size. From 1999 to 2006, the Championship was sponsored and organized by the Seattle Chess Foundation (later renamed America's Foundation for Chess [AF4C]) as a large Swiss system tournament. AF4C withdrew its sponsorship in 2007. The 2007 and 2008 events were held (again under the Swiss system) in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis in St Louis has hosted the annual event since 2009.

America's national chess championship is the world's oldest.

G.H. Mackenzie died in April 1891 and, later that year, Max Judd proposed he, J.W. Showalter and S. Lipschütz contest a triangular match for the championship. Lipschütz withdrew so Judd and Showalter played a match which the latter won. A claim by Walter Penn Shipley that S. Lipschütz became US Champion as a result of being the top-scoring American at the Sixth American Chess Congress, New York 1889 is refuted in a biography of Lipschütz. The following US Champions until 1909 were decided by matches.

The 2016 US Chess Championship was played between April 13 and 30, 2016 in the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis in Saint Louis, Missouri. The main tournament consisted of the top-3 US players in terms of FIDE ranking, Wesley So, Hikaru Nakamura, and Fabiano Caruana. The other tournament participants included Gata Kamsky, Varuzhan Akobian, Alexander Shabalov, Alexander Onischuk, Aleksandr Lenderman, Samuel Shankland, Ray Robson, and juniors Akshat Chandra and Jeffery Xiong.

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