2023 Canadian Transnational Championship (CTN)

[Hans Jung]

After 5 Shawn Rodrigue Lemieux and Razvan Preotu are tied for the lead with Awonder Liang with 4 out of 5. Canadian fans should be cheering loud. No end of great games and competitive pairings.

[Hans Jung]

After 5 Alice Lee is +1 and 4 draws all against GM's. Outstanding performance.

[Aris Marghetis]

I just found it just so cool that in Round 7 of this great field, Canadians were on 3 of the first 4 boards!

[Hugh Brodie]

I will be posting a link to a PGN file of the games which will be updated as the games are entered.

[Hans Jung]

I lost internet connection Saturday afternoon and it just resumed today. I apologise for not being able to post in the last two days of excitement in this tournament and am thrilled that both Shawn RodrigueLemieux and Nikolay Noritsyn earned GM norms! Is this Shawn's third GM norm? - and Im very happy that Nikolay is back on track in his hunt for the GM title.

[Stephen Wright]

The top section will have 18 GMs - is this a record for an event in Canada? The 2011 Canadian Open had 13 GMs. Maybe Quebec Opens have had more?

In the lest we forget category, there was the 1988 World Chess Festival in Saint John. International #2 alone included 33 GMs, 30 IMs and 6 FMs for a total of 69 titled players, headed by Tal, Vaganian, and Yusupov. Average rating varies depending upon how the five unrated players are treated, but somewhere in the low 2400s.

[Salim Belcadi]

Very interesting. I was not aware of that event. I did a little bit of digging:

"In 1988 Saint John, NB hosted the "World Chess Festival," which attracted the largest gathering of top chess players in history. The highlight of the event was a spectacular win by Spraggett in a match against Soviet Grandmaster Andrae Sokolov."

Source:
Chess | The Canadian Encyclopedia

Full list of players:
Saint John op-1 1988 - 365Chess.com Tournaments

In total 57 FIDE titled players:
- 31 GMs
- 20 IMs
- 5 FMs
- 1 WGM
Knowing that nowadays a player can claim a CM title from FIDE after crossing 2200, the equivalent would be 76 titled players.

The average rating was 2417, higher than the CTN last week (2387). It was truly a fantastic event.

Thanks a lot Stephen for the info!

[Stephen Wright]

Congratulations on the CTN! To clarify, the 1988 World Chess Festival consisted of several events which included:

Candidates' Matches: Sokolov-Spraggett, Short-Sax, Speelman-Seirawan, Portisch-Vaganian, Hjartarson-Korchnoi, Yusupov-Ehlvest, Timman-Salov

International #1 (which you give statistics for above)

International #2 (which I gave statistics for in my original post)

Open Class #1 and #2

World Amateur

World Blitz Championship, won by Tal ahead of Kasparov and Karpov

[Hans Jung]

https://en.chessbase.com/post/alice-lee-earns-im-title

[Aris Marghetis]

https://en.chessbase.com/post/alice-lee-earns-im-title

Thanks Hans! (you are SO GOOD with posts!)

[Hans Jung]

Aris, I just sort through a little bit of chess news almost every morning and anything that catches my eye ..... Of course, I have to know when to refrain from posting

[Chris Wang]

Hi Salim, I sent a private message to u. Would u please check?

[Salim Belcadi]

Checking now