2018 U.S. Open -- Result Postings Late, Live Coverage Good

All Things Chess
1

This is a general gripe about the abysmal late postings of results at the U.S. Open.

I, and presumably many others, have been interested in following the results of my friends in the Nat’l Senior Tournament of Champions, and the Denker/Barber/NGTOC. As I write this, the latter three tournaments are 24 hours behind in their posting of results. Round 6 is about to start and results of rounds 4 & 5 haven’t been posted yet. The Senior tournament is up to date, but earlier in the event was also 2 rounds behind.

This makes it impossible to follow the tournament and spoils it for fans.
In this internet age there should be better coverage at least of results. How hard can it be to post the results of one round before you start another? I understand their might be issues with understaffing and results postings can be a lower priority – but that is only because results posting was an afterthought and not a priority from the beginning at the planning stage. Future major USCF tournaments should put more emphasis on this. Get a local teenager to volunteer to post these files on the internet for you – it takes about 5 minutes.

On a positive note, I watched the livestream on twitch.tv last night and it was very good, with excellent commentary by Pete Karagainis and W. Aramil. The only drawback there was that they could only cover a half-dozen games from a few top boards, as that was all that was being broadcast. Still it was good and an improvement on previous years.

2

The tournaments are over, they’ve had the award ceremonies, and still online they have not yet posted the results even for round 4 yet, much less the final results. Apparently our girl’s representative Veronika Zilajeva won the NGOTC – but I only know this because a friend who is there sent me a photo of her at the awards ceremony this afternoon. I haven’t been able to confirm it.

USCF should be better at posting results than this.

3

There’s this: new.uschess.org/news/results-ch … p-quartet/

4

I was actively following all 4 invitationals. The results were updated promptly, but you had to follow the links to PDF files at denkerchess.com and three other websites. For example, the standings after round 4 were posted when round 5 had begun. And I found overnight results and pairings were posted before I went to bed.

Perhaps they could have posted the same info on uschess.org/results itself. Instead they chose to post links for us to follow.

Michael Aigner