Congratulations to Gata Kamsky who - after a long interval - won only his second US Championship title after he held the draw against Yury Shulman in the deciding sudden death playoff game.
Kamsky and Shulman shared $25,000 each after drawing their round 3 encounter in the Quad Final to finish unbeaten on 2/3, a full point clear of defending champion Hikaru Nakamura and Alexander Onischuk. Both Kamsky and Shulman though had to come back to slug it out with an additional $5,000 and the U.S. Championship title on the line.
And with literally seconds left on his clock in the sudden death playoff, and having miraculously made many comebacks from the dead in the game, Kamsky skillfully liquidated the endgame into a sure-fire draw to capture the 2010 U.S. title - a full 19 years after he last won the title back in his teenage years!
In the final round of the Challenger's Swiss (which was the rest of the field in St. Louis minus Nakamura, Kamsky, Onischuk and Shulman), another former champion, Alex Shabalov took the top prize of $10,000 on 6/9. There was also some conciliation for Nakamura, who scored 8.5/9 (drawing only with Chess.FM stalwart Larry Christiansen) to win the top prize of $2,000 in the US Championship $10,000 Blitz tournament.
You can find all the reports, photos, videos and pgn downloads at the official Chess Club & Scholastic Center of St. Louis site by clicking here. And below you can view for free all of Chess.FM's Game of the Day's from the US Championship with hosts GM Nick De Firmian and IM Mark Ginsburg.
Now that we've come to the end of our U.S. Championship coverage, there's now only two days left of our FREE PREVIEW period on ICC. Everyone is welcome to sign up for a new trial to test drive what's new inside ICC until midnight EDT on Wednesday, 26th May - and NO TRIALS WILL BE TURNED AWAY! So catch your last-chance, unrestricted free trial today by clicking here.
