Perfect Scores at the US Chess Championship and the Opening Board: When Data, Market and a Flawed Report Tell Three Different Stories

For four years in the VTC commentary booth, I covered almost every classic final of the Davis and Hendley era. My job then was to turn dry moves into stories. But the longer I worked, the more I noticed a paradox: people remember moments, while the truth lives in the numbers nobody bothers to check.

This season, following the US Chess Championship, I ran into exactly that moment again. On the news feed, two names surfaced with perfect scores. Wesley So, a player who has stood at the top for over a decade. Awonder Liang, a rising young face. Both held perfect scores, and immediately the headlines appeared: unstoppable, devastating form, title favorite.

I read those lines and asked a few very simple questions. Perfect over how many rounds? Against which opponents? In what format? And most importantly, where does the source of those numbers come from? When I traced the original report back, I found something stranger than the result itself: its title spoke of the US Championship, but the body devoted almost its entire length to promoting six instructional videos by an International Master named Valeri Lilov, built around Black's plans after 1.d4 d5. Two entirely different stories were forced into one frame.

That is why I am writing this piece. Not to retell a scoreboard, but to dissect three layers of story stacked inside a single report: a national championship in progress, an opening-knowledge market in motion, and a data failure few want to look at directly. Those three layers are not separate. They say a great deal about how chess is packaged and sold to the public today.

Context: A national event outside the big cycle

The US Chess Championship is a national-tier event, typically run as a round-robin where the country's strongest players face each other directly over a long series of games. It is not a stage in FIDE's world championship qualification cycle. This must be made clear from the start, because many readers still assume every major event leads straight to the Candidates arena. The US Championship carries national prestige, is a place to assert status and build rating, and, just as importantly, is a stage for sponsors and online platforms to generate content.

The broader context is that the United States is in a very strong phase in terms of depth. At the very top, it has players around the 2700 rating threshold, names familiar to anyone following elite chess over the past decade. Right beneath them is a fast-maturing next generation, young faces trained systematically, drilled in a dense junior circuit, and nourished by a hugely developed online platform ecosystem. The presence of a young player like Awonder Liang on the leading path, even if only a start, remains a more meaningful signal than the result of an established name.

But here is what I want to stress as a long-time observer. When a single report merges the results of an event with a commercial instructional product, the reader no longer receives information; they receive a mixed package. The results portion is thin, missing a full standings table, missing round counts, missing opponents, missing even the date. The product portion is dense with advertising language. That ratio is itself a story about how chess content is mass-produced.

Core: The opening board Black has to face

The body of the original report revolves around a narrow but real technical topic: how Black copes with opening systems in which White avoids main-line theory after 1.d4 d5. In other words, after White plays 1.d4 and Black answers 1...d5, White would normally advance 2.c4 to enter the heavy main lines. But a group of players chooses another path. They delay or skip 2.c4, instead building a solid setup that depends little on main-line theory, and wait for the right moment. That is the opening group any serious Black player must have a response to.

The six instructional videos promise to equip Black with a plan for each system. The group named includes the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, and the London System, alongside the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, and the Richter-Veresov. That is a wide list, and the very breadth deserves analysis.

Let me start with the London System, perhaps the most familiar name to club players. White builds a solid pyramid with moves like Nf3, Bf4, e3, c3, and Bd3, then depending on the position advances e4 or Ne5. The London's strength lies in being nearly immune to theoretical traps: White rarely loses by going off-book, because they are not trying to follow the book. Its weakness is the same thing. White creates no pressure forcing Black to solve a problem from the start, so Black has time to deploy a clear plan. A Black player who understands the London will target the center, push c4 to challenge the structure, and look to trade pieces to soften White's accumulating pressure.

The Colle System operates on a similar logic but a different rhythm. White builds Nf3, e3, Bd3, then prepares the e4 break to crack the center. This is an old system, played at every level, and its strength lies not in lethality but in patience. A Black player facing the Colle must decide very early: keep the center closed or open it? If closed, White gains space and time to build a kingside attack. If open, Black must accept that their good structure may be broken but gains open diagonals for the minor pieces.

The Trompowsky Attack is far bolder. Right after 1.d4 Nf6, White plays 2.Bg5, throwing a bishop deep into Black's camp before building any central structure. This is an annoying opening, because it forces Black to handle a specific threat before deploying a long-term plan. Black usually resolves it by building a structure with e6 and a flexible move sequence, accepting that the White bishop will be traded or driven back, but in return getting a balanced position. What is interesting about the Trompowsky is that it frequently transposes into structures from other systems, making preparation of a single plan meaningless.

The Torre Attack follows a more familiar path: White builds Nf3, Black answers with e6, then Bg5, aiming at pressure on Black's minor pieces. This structure is related to the London System but carries a higher adversarial character, because the bishop on g5 actively pins and disrupts. Once again, Black must choose between simplifying and maintaining tension.

The Catalan is a clearly different case in the list. It arises from 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3, meaning White does not avoid the center but still advances c4, differing only in placing the bishop on the kingside via g2 to control the long diagonals. The Catalan is a genuine main-line system, not a shortcut. Including it alongside the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit shows the compiler wanted a truly complete catalog, even where the frequency of the systems differs greatly.

The Blackmar-Diemer Gambit is its own phenomenon. With 1.d4 d5 2.e4, White sacrifices a pawn on move two to open lines for the minor pieces and create a chaotic fight. At the top level, this is a gamble that rarely appears, because Black has clear ways to accept and refute. But at club level, it is a genuine nightmare, because Black often cannot recall the exact main lines and is easily dragged into a fight they never prepared for.

The Richter-Veresov closes the list with a rare system: 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Bg5. White uses the knight and bishop to pressure Black's center without needing c4. Its frequency is low, but when it appears, an unprepared Black player easily drifts into a passive position.

Taken as a whole, this is a reasonable and real picture. The issue is not whether those systems exist, but how they are packaged.

The contrarian angle: The label is not the truth

In the original report's description, the systems above are called extremely dangerous. This is where I want to stop for a long while, because it is a perfect example of marketing language being mistaken for expert assessment.

Let me try to ask the question calmly. Is the London System dangerous? To an elite player, the answer is no, because they meet it often enough to prepare and they understand the balancing options. To a club player who has never faced it seriously, it can be a major challenge. So the danger is not a fixed property of the opening; it is a function of the opponent's level and their preparation. When an instructional product calls these systems extremely dangerous, it is not describing an objective truth. It is describing the fear of the target customer.

That is a classic sales technique: identify a threat, exaggerate it, then sell the solution. This approach is not ethically wrong in business, as long as it is not presented as technical analysis. The problem arises when that advertising content is placed in the same frame as event-result news, making it hard for readers to distinguish information from a sales pitch.

There is also a scope point to make. Including both the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov in a product against 1.d4 d5 reveals a completist mindset. But study cost is not proportional to encounter frequency. A Black player might spend dozens of hours memorizing Richter-Veresov lines, while the chance an opponent actually plays that system in a club event is very low. In the economics of opening preparation, the expected value of a line equals frequency times danger times study cost. When frequency approaches zero, expected value approaches zero, whatever label the system carries.

And here is what I learned after years of observation. In the chess world, market noise is always louder than the signal from the board. A new product, a new course, a new six-video set, all have an incentive to make you believe that if you do not buy, you will be defeated. But the board does not care about labels. The board only cares about correct and incorrect moves.

There is another dimension the original report completely ignores, and I want to speak about it as someone who advocates for women's sport. In that thin results list, one line mentions a female player with a short name, and that line appears and vanishes as if it did not matter. The forgotten queens, that is the phrase I still use for them. The summer of Russia, I went looking for queens whose names were not on the map, and I still do that every time I read a report that gives most of its length to names that are already too familiar.

Women's chess has a parallel history written askew. There have been female players who competed on equal footing with the strongest male players in the world, who broke barriers an entire generation thought unbreakable, and who are still routinely described in words smaller than their true ability. The value of a female player is not on the rating table, but in the fate of girls who dare to dream. When a report gives them only one line, that report is not merely technically incomplete. It is repeating an old habit.

What I want to stress is that these mistakes do not happen in isolation. They share one root: carelessness in the information production process.

The data failure: The systemic disease of automated content

The report I am dissecting has an internal defect that editing cannot fix. The title and the first two information points concern the US Championship. The entire body and the remaining points concern an opening instructional product. The source is marked unknown, the date is absent, and the reliability is low.

This is not a rare accident. In an automated news-gathering system, a single small error in pairing a title with content can produce a bizarre hybrid like this. Two different articles are merged into one. The reader receives an information package in which every part is half-finished.

The consequences of this kind of error are more serious than they appear. First, it destroys trust. When readers discover the title does not match the content, they lose faith not only in that article but in the platform that published it. Second, it creates distorted knowledge. A non-expert reader might believe Wesley So and Awonder Liang are genuinely leading an event with perfect scores, when in fact the report offers no evidence for it beyond a short mention. Third, it dilutes the signal. Amid countless correct and incorrect pieces mixed together, a serious reader must arm themselves with a filter, and that burden should not be theirs.

I wonder what would happen if every chess report had to meet a minimum standard: state the source, state the date, separate information from advertising. The answer is probably that the volume of content would fall, but quality would rise. In a sport where the truth lives in every move, keeping information clean is not a trade-off; it is a condition for survival.

I once watched a women's team stand at the edge of dissolution as the money drained away, and I understood that a community's survival depends on trust as much as on money. In 2026, we did not save the team. We saved the belief that the team deserved to exist. That belief was built with accurate numbers, verified stories, and kept promises. A single flawed report does not kill chess, but thousands of flawed reports erode its foundation.

An open ending: What matters is not the scoreboard

When I left the VTC commentary booth after four years, I carried a simple lesson. My job was not to make the story more exciting than the truth. My job was to find the truth and tell it well enough that people want to listen.

With this season's US Chess Championship, the truth needs to be waited for. The full standings, the round counts, the opponents, the actual performance against rating, all of that will say more than any headline. If Awonder Liang genuinely sustains above-rating form throughout the event, that will be the most valuable signal, because it speaks of the future rather than the past. As for Wesley So's result, impressive as it is, it only confirms what we already know: he is an elite player.

With the opening market, the truth also needs to be waited for. An instructional product is worth something only when it helps learners understand the board, not when it makes them fear it. And for the female players buried under a single line, the simple truth is that they deserve a proper place in every report, not out of fairness, but because they play well enough to deserve it.

I have seen a generation ready to press, and I believe they will never step back. That generation includes young players who dare to attack, writers who dare to check sources, and girls who dare to sit down at the board without anyone's permission. The only remaining question is whether we have enough patience to read the real board, instead of the headlines written in advance for us.