San Diego. (DD #175 below) After three years in the rainy northwest, the US Championship is leaving the home of its sponsor group and getting some sun in Southern California. The Swiss-system tournament will take place during the first two weeks of December at the new NTC Foundation's Promenade Centre.
The NTC Foundation is a nonprofit corporation in charge of renovating and developing a large area that used to be home to the Naval Training Center. The space will be used for civic and cultural purposes and the 2004 US Championship will be the inaugural event of the flagship Promenade Centre. (Why they spelled it wrong I've no idea. Americans using "quaint" British spelling intentionally has always bothered me. Why not "Ye Olde Promenade Centre"?)
NTCF will co-sponsor the Championship with organizers AF4C, which is A-OK. The prize fund stays at the world's largest: $250,000. (Rumor has it that the Aeroflot Open (January) is trying to squeeze some more money out of the airline to take the prize fund title. AF4C honcho and sponsor Erik Anderson says that would be great because then he could use that to raise even more! Now this is a US-Russia arms race I can get behind!)
Quoth Anderson in a press release scheduled to come out in full this week: "AF4C has been looking for a partner whose mission is aligned with ours: NTC supports creative education and believes in the value the U.S. Chess Championships can bring to the national expansion of the AF4C classroom chess curriculum."
I believe there will also be chess tournaments open to the public running alongside the Championship. This will create a great festival atmosphere like you see during many of the summer events across Europe.
ChessMaster is again a sponsor and I believe the ICC is already committed as well. It will be interesting to see if the organizers decide to have a serious web presence for the 2004 event or if they will continue to basically outsource coverage and analysis to ChessBase (and ChessNinja...) One thing I've found while running the official sites for major events like the Kramnik and Kasparov man-machine matches is that quickly releasing media-friendly reports dramatically increases coverage in the general press.
When one game of the 2002 Kramnik-Fritz match in Bahrain match went late and I wasn't allowed to stay and publish a report, the next day the news coverage had dropped dramatically. Few news agencies will bother to have a specialist figure out what's going on and write a chess report based only on the gamescore and result and the non-chess writers don't know what's going on. But if you spoon-feed them a nice summary in plain English with a little drama they'll copy-paste and run the story. In San Diego perhaps this should also be done in Spanish to increase local coverage. Did I mention I'm fluent in Spanish?! Chess, sun, and good Mexican food. Sign me up!
