The Quest for 2500

As I called it in my first report, the "quest for 2500" is IM Josh Friedel's adventure to try and reach that magic FIDE 2500 rating during this tournament. Having secured his third and final GM norm, all he needs now is the rating to confirm the title.

His rating on the FIDE list on April 1st was 2484. Unfortunately, a decent gain of 5.5 points was totally washed away by a bad US Championship Qualifier event in which he lost 16.6 points. However, according to calculations from the US Championship tournament where Josh secured his final norm, that event gained him 16.3 points which left him at approximately 2489 going into the Chicago Open.

His first round win was amazingly followed up by a second round win against highest seed, GM Hikaru Nakamura. This is obviously really useful (duh!) and by my calculations he has gained 7.6 points so far. FIDE has a wonderful rule for titles in that to obtain the rating, it need not be published but just "reached" during any time at all, even in the middle of a tournament!

With that in mind, Josh Friedel now stands approximately 3 points from securing his GM title!  Go Josh!

In other news from round 2 of the 4-day schedule there were draws all around on boards 2 through 4 as GM Sharavdorj held GM Petrosian, IM Stopa held GM Shulman and Canadian FM Quan held GM Shabalov. A bit further down, FM Gulamali managed to hold GM Hernandez which leaves Akobian, Becerra and Yermolinsky as the only GMs tied at the top with Friedel from the 4-day schedule.

Also joining us in Chicago today were the 3-day schedule participants which include another 3 GMs, Atanas Kolev, Dmitry Gurevich and Nikola Mitkov. They all managed to work their way through the 1st round of two G/75 matches but the second round saw the all GM matchup of Gurevich vs Mitkov. In the end Mitkov managed to get the better of Gurevich in a time scramble and will join Kolev, who beat FM Florin Felecan in the 2nd round.  These two players will join in with the other 4 perfect scores from the 4-day schedule for round 3 which begins at 7:00 pm CST.

Chris Bird