Illinois Chess Association

The Illinois Chess Association (ICA), the official state affiliate of the United States Chess Federation, is pleased to invite bids for the 2010 Illinois All Grade Championships. This ICA-sanctioned state championship is slated to be held in the Upstate/Chicago Metropolitan area in November 2010.

Bid specifications and procedures are available on this web site. Refer to the main menu at left and click on “Bids”.

Bids are due by January 31, 2010 at 6:00 p.m., and should be delivered via email to Garrett Scott, ICA Bid Committee Chairman at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Receipt of bid submissions will be confirmed by email.

Bids must be submitted in electronic format, in a form that is easily printable. Documents in Microsoft Word (or other word processing program compatible with Word) as well as Adobe Acrobat PDF documents are acceptable.

The Bid Award will be made on or before February 25, 2010.

Please note there has been a small correction in the bid guidelines for the November 2010 All-Grades. Section IV now reads that the amount of any fee remission to ICA needs to be specified in a bid only "if it is not already specified for a particular event." A "tournament membership" of $1.50 per player was specified in the bid requirements for the November 2010 All-Grades, so no other remission is necessary.

Congratulations to IM Angelo Young of the Chicago Blaze for being named an all-star in U.S. Chess League's first team. The league has first, second, and third all-star teams, and Angelo is Board 3, behind GMs Hikaru Nakamura and Boris Gulko, on the first team. With NM Eric Rodriguez on board four, that's one heck of a team.

Joint efforts by dedicated people from the Illinois Chess Association and CoChess led to the establishment on November 11th of two new standing committees in the ICA. The Youth Committee will focus on building youth chess in the state. The Bid Committee will manage the procurement of bids and awarding of contracts for ICA events, both youth and adult.

The two new committees are the result of recommendations from two temporary task forces set up by the two groups in early September.

I think everyone has experienced this feeling, you go to a tournament and you’re the lowest rated player in the event. Your confidence then goes way down and you are in somewhat awe of your fellow opponent’s rating.

Well this is what is happening to me at Sevan’s tournament in January 2010. The field has been set it is a 10 round 5 player double round robin tournament. Five games on a weekend in January and five on a weekend in February.

It is unusual being a Master and all to be the lowest rated player and it hasn’t happened to me for a long time. I will be playing with IM’s Felecan, Pasalic and Vishnuvardhan. FM’s Admason and Shankar. Then me the lowly untitled player.

[game follows . . .]

FM Andrew Karklins scored 4/6 in the Open Section of the 2009 Kings Island tournament last weekend and tied for first place.

Andrew has of course been playing chess for while and despite not playing too often he always seems to do well when he does.

Andrew took a draw in the first round against an Ohio expert. He then proceeded to defeat 3 expert players and draw with an IM.

Congratulations to Andrew for a fine performance. He gained 16 rating points from the tournament to move up to 2263.

In other news from the tournament expert Zach Kasiurak scored 4/6 in the U2100 section to tie for second place. Zach gained 27 rating points to move up to 2061.

Expert from Evanston chess club Matthew Pullin scored 3.5/6 in the U2100 section for a tie for fourth place only losing one game to the section winner. Matthew gained 10 rating points to move up to 2049.

The state’s top high school players will be invited to compete next March in the Illinois Denker High School Qualifier, where the winner is named the official state representative to the U.S. Denker High School Tournament of Champions.  The national tournament will be held July 31 to August 3 in Irvine, California.

DATE: Friday, March 19 to Sunday, March 21, 2010

Do you run a chess club? Are you looking to spread the word? There are three ways to advertise your club and your events on our website.

Post on the Forum. The Clubs and Club News section is a great place to start. Register for a free account and post your information.

List your events on Events. Plan an event and send the details to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The ICA makes this service free to all chess organizers, schools and individuals. It's one of the principle missions of the association. You need not be an ICA member or affiliate to use it. Your events need not be USCF rated.

Affiliate with the ICA. Help support the coummunity. It's only $25 a year, and we offer a free six month, trial period. We'll put you on our Affiliates List and give you "Author" access to our web page. As an author, you can run an introductory article and post your tournament results. Results stay on our front page for about a week and then move to the "Club News" section.

Welcome to the newly designed web page. The page is driven by Joomla 1.5, an open source, content management system (CMS). A CMS allows non-programmers to contribute directly to the page. We hope it will allow many kinds of community participation that were impossible before.

Navigation is not fully developed yet, but here are a few hints. The top links are very nearly the same as they were on the old page. Sub menus will appear at the bottom on the left as you click on the various top menu items. The "Main Menu" on the left is where new developments will happen. There are already some new sections, like Youth News and Club News. More will follow.

Create an account on the Web Page. Once you have verified your account, and your account has been approved, it will work for the Forum, too. You need to do this even if you were registered on the old Forum.

Join us on the Forum. Your opinions and comments are welcome.

Sincerely,
Tom Sprandel
President