2019 Champions Showdown, St. Louis

September was one of the best months ever for chess960. On top of the latest action in the FWFRCC (that stands for 'FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship', as in my previous post Phase Three of FWFRCC Completed), we had the 2019 Champions Showdown: Chess 9LX (uschesschamps.com). What's 'Chess 9LX'? It's '9' plus the Roman numerals 'LX', i.e. '60', but the less said about that the better.

This is the fifth chess960 event from the Saint Louis Chess Club that I've covered on this blog. The others were:-

• 2012-01-07: Kings and Queens on Chess960
• 2014-09-13: Chess960 'Showdown' in St.Louis
• 2017-11-18: Chess960 Showdown (played in November 2015)
• 2018-09-22: Champions Showdown, St. Louis

As for a summary of the 2019 event, here's a screen snapshot from the official 'Chess 9LX' site. The selection of the start positions followed the same procedure as for the 2018 event, which I quoted in the corresponding post.

The chess news sites covered the 2019 event in depth, although I imagine it was more for Kasparov's participation than for chess960. Here's the coverage by Chess24.com:-

• 2019-09-02: Kasparov returns to face Caruana in Chess960
• 2019-09-03: Chess 9LX, Day 1: Kasparov suffers heavy blow
• 2019-09-04: Chess 9LX, Day 2: Kasparov gets to have some fun
• 2019-09-05: Chess 9LX, Day 3: Caruana beats Kasparov
• 2019-09-06: Chess 9LX, Day 4: Nakamura completes comeback

In the first decade of the century, Mainz was the geographical center of chess960. In the second decade, it's been St. Louis. After the third decade starts in a few months, will the focus expand to new localities?