As a group, Illinois players who participated in the recent U.S. Open tournament performed returned home not only with higher ratings but also with fatter wallets, collectively racking up almost $7,500 in prize money. As previously reported here, local Chicago GM Dmitry Gurevich won the tournament, netting him over $2,800, and junior player Eric Rosen tied for first in the Expert class, earning his national master title, along with $1,359, a nice paycheck for a high school sophomore not quite old enough to drive.
But they weren't the state's only winners. Two other Illinois high school sophomores, Stevenson’s Kent Cen and Buffalo Grove’s Matthew Wilbur, earned more than $1,100 each by scoring 5.5 points and tying for first place in the Class B section. Wilbur was the Illinois player with the biggest rating gain, bulldozing through his higher-rated opponents and amassing a whopping 120 points (1837 to 1957) with 5.5 points that included wins against one master and three experts. Cen also broke through the 1900 mark for the first time. And Whitney Young 8th grader Sam Schmakel scored 6 points, tying for second place in the Class A section, garnering a $755 prize and reaching an all-time rating high of 1969.
Other Illinois players who brought home a little bacon included other Chicago-area GMs Nikola Mitkov ($110 and tied for 7th place overall) and Mesgen Amanov ($65 and tied for 3rd in the Master category. Longtime Illinois chess fixture FM Andrew Karklins also tied for 3rd in the Master category.
Youth players who did well included high school junior Trevor Magness and recent high school graduate Gordon Ruan, each scoring 6 points and tying for 4th in the Expert category, which netted them about $24 each, maybe enough to pay for the tank of gas home. Ruan, who last spring led his Urbana lab high school team to a first place finish at the state high school chess championship, will attend Washington University in St. Louis as a freshman this fall as a premed major, eventually allowing him to augment his chess earnings! For Magness, the U.S. Open capped off the equivalent of a chess marathon, for he had just come off representing Illinois in the Denker High School tournament of Champions, where he received fifth-place honors in a highly competitive field.
Rosen, Ruan, Schmakel and Magness are all 2009 Warren Junior Scholars, an ICA program which recognizes and provides funding for the state’s top youth players. Other Warren Junior Scholars who participated in the U.S. Open included Experts Michael Auger and Zach Kasiurak, and while they finished out of the money, both had plus scores (Auger with 5.5 and Kasiurak with 5) and gained in rating points. Auger also had the rare opportunity to play at Board 1 against top-seeded IM Ben Finegold, a valuable experience in its own right.