A battalion of 700 chess combatants invaded north suburban Wheeling for the 2013 Chicago Open completed May 27. A three-way tie in the Open Section found three Midwest-based Grandmasters with 7.0/9 scores.

Missouri's Ray Robson, Wisconsin's Josh Friedel and 2012 Illinois Open co-champion Nikola Mitkov split top prize money, each earning over $5,800 a piece. Robson earned a $200 bonus for posting the top tie-break.

Other top Illinois-registrants included Dmitry Gurevich, Vlad Georgiev and Mesgen Amanov with 5.5/9 scores.

High school sophomore Sam Schmakel posted a 5.0/9 score.

Grandmaster Yury Shulman and graduating high school senior Adarsh Jayakumar finished with impressive 4.5/9 results.

This was the 22nd Chicago Open and represented the sixth year the Continental Chess Association event was held at the opulent Westin North Shore Hotel in Wheeling.

In the Under 2300 section, Aung Zin and Gopal Menon scored 5.5/7, placing in a four-way tie for first, taking home $2,425 checks.

In Under 2100 play, Sameer Manchanda of Indiana and Ben Rothschild of Illinois split $7,500, both posting 6.0/7 results.  Illinois-registrants Rene Ancheta and James Pavese both earned $820 with 5.5/7 tallies, in the third-through-seventh place pack.

Results for the other sections are detailed in a subsequent posting on this site.

The 2013 Chicago Open represents the fourth leg of the ten-event 2013 Illinois Chess Tour. 

The Chicago Open is historically the second largest chess event held in Illinois each year, surpassed only by the Illinois High School Association team event, held in Peoria in early February. That event is unrated by the US Chess Federation (sadly) but typically sees over one thousand entrants playing more than 3500 individual games over two days.