The Opening: Daily Chess News from First Look Chess – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Opening: Daily Chess News from First Look Chess

First Look Chess

Leisure

News

Frequency: 1 episode/1d. Total Eps: 37

Daily chess news in about five minutes: the results, the players and the decisions that matter to American chess, every morning.

The Opening is the audio edition of First Look Chess, a daily newsletter for players, organizers, coaches and serious fans. Each episode covers the top five stories of the day — the Olympiad and the world championship cycle, the US Championships and US Chess national events, norms and rating milestones, federation news and the business of chess — drawn from the newsletter's morning edition, with facts checked against sources before they are read.

The full edition, with links, games and PGNs to download, is available for subscribers at firstlookchess.com.

Read by a synthetic voice. Powered by AI, guided by human expertise.

(Note: Some names will be mispronounced at first; we fix each one as we hear it.)

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🇺🇸 USA - Games
24/10/2026
#79

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The Opening, Oct 23: Wesley So takes the national title

Friday, October 23, 2026 • Duration 05:57

Every story in this episode is in the First Look Chess newsletter, with the links, the games, and the PGNs to download: firstlookchess.com

In this episode:

Wesley So is U.S. Champion for a fourth time, beating Fabiano Caruana 1.5-0.5 in Thursday's rapid playoff in St. Louis — a draw with Black, then a win in 33 moves after Caruana's gambit misfired — to take the title and $56,000 one day after his last-round loss to Sam Sevian had let Caruana catch him on 7/11; it is So's first national title since 2021 and ends Caruana's run of four straight.
The November US Chess rating supplement arrived with 1,320,281 names on the rating list, 5,873 more than the October list; among top-100 players the biggest regular-rating moves are Elizabeth C Smith's 128-point climb to 1543 on the Women 50+ list and Abigail Zhou's 106 points to 2096 on Girls Under 16, where three more listed players gained between 88 and 100 points.
Three teams share the lead on 11/12 going into Friday's final round of the European Club Cup in Budva after SuperChess Romania and Novy Bor drew their top-table match 3-3 and Bayegan Pendik beat Tuxera Aquaprofit Nagykanizsai 3.5-2.5 despite Pranesh M beating Anish Giri on board one with a bishop sacrifice Giri took after four and a half minutes' thought; Bodhana Sivanandan, 11, plays Friday for a third IM norm that would break Judit Polgar's female age record for the title, set 38 years ago, the Guardian says.
Jeroen van den Berg, tournament director of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament since 1999, will step down after the 89th edition in January 2027 and hand the Wijk aan Zee event to GM Erwin l'Ami from 2028, the organizers announced; the two will run the coming edition together, and van den Berg stays on as an adviser until January 2030.
Both Americans on the European Club Cup relay won on Thursday, Gennadie Slavin (FIDE 2201) beating IM Pavel Govciyan (2408) of France and GM Kirk Ghazarian (2530) also scoring, while FM Evan Sammons beat IM Vadym Petrovskiy of Germany at the Annemasse Masters; at home US Chess newly rated 42 events across 25 states, led by a 333-player scholastic in Pharr, Texas, and three US Chess outreach grants are among four grants worth $3,000 for McAllen elementary chess programs.

The Opening is written from the day's evidence and checked by the same fact rules as the newsletter; the voice is synthetic. Powered by AI, guided by human expertise.

The Opening: Daily Chess News from First Look Chess – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Opening: Daily Chess News from First Look Chess – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities