Happy New Year 2010.

As expected, Magnus Carlsen topped the 2010 FIDE list at 2810. Current world championship challenger Veselin Topalov is five points behind at 2805.

As it turns out, I will not be playing the 2010 Colorado Correspondence Semi-final after all. Fourteen players signed up this year, a 50% increase from last year. Jeff Baffo, the 2009 champion, automatically received a bye to the final, leaving thirteen. Six the budget only allows for six or at the most seven games per person in the semi-finals, the semi-finals were organized into 3 groups of four. As the 2009 runner-up, I also received a bye to the final. Jeff and I will be joined in the final by the three group leaders, and at least the top two scoring 2nd place finishers (creating a seven-player round robin). If all three 2nd place finishers score 4.5 or more points, then all three 2nd place finishers will advance and it will be an eight-player round robin.

In related news, the January 2010 Check is in the Mail has the full standings for the 2009 Colorado CC Championship!

Since I'm not participating in the Colorado Semi-finals, I elected to start in an earlier section of the 2010 Electronic Knights instead. The Knights have three sections, preliminaries, semi-finals, and finals. In order to progress to the next stage, players need to score at least 4.5 points in the final, or win their section with at least 4.0. A weighted score is calculated to determine the winner. The 2006 winner, GM Cesar Augusto Blanco-Gramajo, was just announced, so the entire tournament takes approximately four years, about half of the time that it takes the postal championship, the Golden Knights.

Last year I scored 3.5/6 in my preliminary section, a full point short of the goal. Hopefully this year I can improve upon it.