US Chess National Championships / 2015 U.S. Junior Closed
Suddenly Chandra IM Akshat Chandra continues his rapid rise with a victory
in the 2015 U.S. Junior Closed Championship By BRIAN JERAULD
its winner off into an adult world of global chess. The competition’s very prize—a guar anteed seat
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in next year’s U.S. Cham pionship—is evidence of this transition. Over the past several years, the award has served as a launching pad for those who have earned it, seeing Junior cham pions perform well in the nation’s top competition as they leap to the next level and never look back. Junior winners for better part of the past decade, such as Daniel Naroditsky in 2013 and Sam Shankland before him, have not returned to defend their titles, instead jumping one-and-done with their crown into worldwide professional success. Thanks to a bustling American scho lastic base, the stars of tomorrow are bubbling up from all corners of the country at a faster pace—and at increasingly younger ages. But as these rising players are streamlined toward the U.S. Junior Closed—and America’s moment of chess singu larity—players are discovering an unfortunate logjam as they enter that final threshold: Get in line, buddy! Indeed, each recent year of the U.S. Junior
Closed has featured a similar roster of returning players, lineups that replace last year’s champion with another fresh face who has risen from beneath. In between, returning players cycle through a holding pattern of sorts, building years of experience in a slow advance to the front— waiting for their turn to walk through the door. This recent assembly line has created an almost
predictable march of Junior champions, accented by the marked coming-of-age of the Young Stars- Team USA program. A partnership between the Kasparov Chess Foundation and the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis, the program has sought to develop a handful of American chess prodigies through regular training seminars with Garry Kasparov and other professional guidance. First assembled in 2012, the Young Stars came
to sudden fruition in last year’s U.S. Junior Closed event, showcasing three of the program’s first
he U.S. Junior Closed Championship can be seen as an annual rite of passage: One final assembly of the very best under-21 American talent in an event that blasts
crop of players as the tournament’s top finishers. Utah’s Kayden Troff earned his grandmaster title weeks before the event, entered as the top seed and became the 2014 Junior Cham pion, while Boston’s Sam Sevian took a natural step forward at second place, as did Dallas’ Jeffery Xiong in fourth—results that left a logical prediction of Junior champions to come. Sevian, however, became a talent that couldn’t
wait for the 2015 U.S. Junior Championship. Last November, he broke the American record for youngest-ever grandmaster—a unique rite of passage of its own—announcing his official arrival to professional chess with an international tour as the youngest grandmaster in the world. He appeared in the Challengers division of the 77th Tata Steel super-tournament in Wijk aan Zee in January, and later became a featured invitation for the Lake Sevan International Chess Tourna - ment—a category 16 tournament held in Sevian’s native Armenia, dates of which overlapped this year’s 2015 U.S. Junior Closed.
Closed, he now stepped in as the tournament’s top seed—the crown was officially his to lose. But suddenly, it was Chandra—that’s Interna-
tional Master Akshat Chandra—who won the 2015 U.S. Junior Closed Championship this past July 7-15, 2015. There was no holding pattern, no waiting his turn: The 15-year-old from New Jersey showed up to his first-ever championship invitation and simply cut in line, turning in an undefeated 7/9 clear-first effort and wreck ing Xiong’s destiny by a half point. It’s hard to say nobody saw Chandra coming.
He was certainly no stranger to the scholastic ranks in 2015, sacking the US Chess National High School (K-12) Championship in Columbus, Ohio this past April to become America’s simultaneous high-school cham pion in both blitz and classical time controls. And even that performance in Columbus should have come as no surprise after Chandra won his first national accolades two years prior, becoming the US Chess National Junior High School (K-9) champion at
Thanks to a bustling American scho lastic base, the stars of tomorrow are bubbling up from all corners of the country at a faster pace—and at increasingly younger ages.
Sevian’s corresponding withdrawal from this
year’s Junior Championship—his rightful turn at the crown—presented itself as a direct windfall for Xiong, boasting a banner 2015 of his own. Two months before the Championship, Xiong won the Chicago Open in clear first, earning his third grandmaster (GM) norm and poised to receive the official GM title at 14 years old—only months behind Sevian’s new record. Just as Troff did in 2014, Xiong fit this year’s Junior billing perfectly: In his fourth appearance at the Junior
the 2013 SuperNationals—which featured more than 5,000 participants as the largest chess tournament in the world. To be fair, however, it’s not a stretch to describe
Chandra as US Chess’ version of “coming out of left field.” He entered the 2013 SuperNationals with a 2250 FIDE rating, though sporting a brand- new US Chess identification number after playing his first American tournament just two weeks prior. And before 2013, the last time anyone had seen Chandra around New Jersey, he didn’t play a
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PHOTO : COURTESY OF SUBJECT
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