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.