League Cuts Ladies Bonus

July 15th, 2009 Chris Bird

The US Chess League has recently announced that the rating bonus for using female players in your line-up has been eliminated.  In previous years, every female in your line-up added 10 points to your 2400 average rating cap for a match, meaning you had the potential to use some higher rated players throughout the team.

The USCL has removed the bonus clause and replaced it with a new rule that now allows you to list 9 players on your roster, so long as you have at least one female amongst the players.  All changes will take effect for the 2009 season that kicks off on August 31.

The Blitz are one of few teams to never make use of the female bonus and so this rule change will have little effect for them.  On countless times I tried to persuade Blitz management to add Boston University student WFM Roza Eynullayeva to their team, even possibly as an alternate, just to give them the flexibility of making use of the rule for a game or two.  I’m not sure if they just blew me off or whether Roza declined but it never happened.  (Maybe I just subliminally wanted a change of scenery from the regular weekly motley crew!)

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2008 USCL Preview

August 21st, 2008 Chris Bird

The 2008 USCL season kicks off on Monday, August 25, with a clash between the two new franchises in the league, the Arizona Scorpions and the Chicago Blaze.  The 4th year of the USCL has a lot of expectations to live up to given the exciting divisional battles and USCL Championship game that graced us last year.

With the two new additions comes a whole new play-off format where the top 4 teams from each division will qualify.  Considering there are only 7 teams in each division it means more than half of the 14 teams will participate in the play-off action.  This is a better (worse?) ratio than the NHL and NBA where about only half the teams qualify for the post-season.

Although it puts less emphasis on the regular season, it is important to finish as high as possible in your division as a higher seed gives you the advantage of having draw odds and potentially picking which boards you have the white pieces (or black pieces) on.  Thus your road to the Championship game should theoretically be easier.

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2008 USCL Schedule Released

June 3rd, 2008 Chris Bird

The schedule for the 2008 United States Chess League season has been released.

Play will start on August 25th with a Monday night match-up of the two new teams in the USCL this year, the Arizona Scorpions and the Chicago Blaze.

The Blitz will start their season on Wednesday, August 27th, with a game against bitter rivals, the New York Knights.  The Knights will obviously be trying to avenge their Conference Championship loss to the Blitz, especially after watching the Blitz celebrations that followed!

The Blitz will then go on to face the Carolina Cobras in week 2, which will also be a divisional match-up after Carolina were once again forced to switch conferences, before facing the Dallas Destiny in a Monday night revenge game after the Destiny beat the Blitz in last year’s USCL Championship match.

The regular season will continue for 10 weeks through to October 29th.

After that a new play-off structure has been announced with the top 4 teams from each Conference qualifying for a shot at the title.  Those games will take place on November 5th and 12th with the USCL Championship match set to take place on Saturday, November 22nd, starting in the afternoon to avoid the complications of late finishes that have taken place in the last two Championship matches.

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