2021 Champions Showdown, Live

At the end of last week's post, 2021 Champions Showdown, St. Louis (September 2021), I finished with a promise:-

I'll continue the report on the 2021 event in a follow-up 'Live' post.

The Saint Louis Chess Club has videos for all three days, three rounds per day. Here's the video for the first three rounds.

2021 Champions Showdown | Chess 9LX: Day 1 (4:10:36) • 'Streamed live on Sep 8, 2021'

The description informs,

The world’s top grandmasters battle from September 8-10 in a Fischer random chess round robin. It's Chess960: see what happens when bank-rank pieces are scrambled and opening theory is obliterated! Join GMs Alejandro Ramirez and Maurice Ashley for the move-by-move.

Here are the links for all three days, including the first day, embedded above. '2021 Champions Showdown, Chess 9LX, streamed live on':-

• 2021-09-08: Day 1
• 2021-09-09: Day 2
• 2021-09-10: Day 3

Just as they did for past events, the 9LX organizers used a non-standard numbering system to identify the start positions (SPs). See this page to convert to standard numbering: Chess960 Start Position Converter for Chessgames.com (m-w.com). Here are the nine SPs from the event (using standard numbering):-

Rd.1: SP105 QNRBBNKR
Rd.2: SP280 NBRKBNRQ
Rd.3: SP431 RNQNKRBB
Rd.4: SP268 NBRKNQBR
Rd.5: SP137 NRQBBNKR
Rd.6: SP819 BRKNQRNB
Rd.7: SP047 NNQRKRBB
Rd.8: SP209 BNQBRKNR
Rd.9: SP756 RBBKNNRQ

The PGN game scores were distributed with TWIC 1401. I've extracted them to m-w.com/c960/blog, hoping that some day I'll actually be able to play through them.

2021 Champions Showdown, St. Louis

Remember chess 9LX™? That's the Saint Louis Chess Club’s name for chess960 so they can slap 'TM' on everything, as in Rex™ Sinquefield™, NIH™. Joking aside, the club has become one of the most ardent supporters of Fischer's greatest invention.

Last year we saw the second edition of the club's signature C960 / FRC / 9LX event hosted at an online venue because of the covid pandemic. I covered it in two posts: 2020 Champions Showdown, Lichess (September 2020) and 2020 Champions Showdown Live (ditto). This year the event returned to 9LX's spiritual home in St. Louis.

The official home page for the event appears to be 2021 Champions Showdown: Chess 9LX (uschesschamps.com). That's where we find the crosstable shown below.

A striking aspect of that chart is that the two players who finished last, GMs Nakamura and Svidler, were both World Champions at 960's first spiritual home in Mainz. See, for example, Chess960 World Championships (January 2009) on my main blog, and No Place for Chess960 (February 2011) on this blog. I'll continue the report on the 2021 event in a follow-up 'Live' post.