{"id":5294,"date":"2018-04-29T13:29:25","date_gmt":"2018-04-29T21:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=5294"},"modified":"2018-04-29T13:30:01","modified_gmt":"2018-04-29T21:30:01","slug":"sam-does-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=5294","title":{"rendered":"Sam Does It!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>All in a day&#8217;s work for Sam Shankland:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Wins his sixth game in the U.S. Championship against no losses.<\/li>\n<li>Wins his last three in a row, when even a single draw would have dropped him into a tie for first.<\/li>\n<li>Finishes a half point ahead of Fabiano Caruana, who will challenge Magnus Carlsen for the World Championship later this year.<\/li>\n<li>Leaves Wesley So and Hikaru Nakamura in the dust.<\/li>\n<li>Has a 2884 performance rating against one of the strongest fields ever in a U.S. championship.<\/li>\n<li>Raises his FIDE rating above 2700, only the seventh American in history to reach that level.<\/li>\n<li>Cracks the world top 50 (he will be #45 in the world).<\/li>\n<li>Wins a $50,000 first prize.<\/li>\n<li>And, oh, by the way, for the rest of his life he can put the words<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">2018 United States Champion<\/span><\/h3>\n<p>after his signature.<\/p>\n<p>Pretty good day, Sam! You don&#8217;t need my congratulations, but you have earned them anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Also, by the way, it was not a bad tournament for Caruana. He will surely face questions like, &#8220;How can the world championship contender not even be #1 in his own country?&#8221; But his score of 8-3 would have won in most years. He just had one hallucination against Zviad Izoria that caused him to lose a totally drawn game. Even world championship candidates screw up now and then, and it was just Caruana&#8217;s bad luck to be chasing someone who did not screw up one time in the whole tournament.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All in a day&#8217;s work for Sam Shankland: Wins his sixth game in the U.S. Championship against no losses. Wins his last three in a row, when even a single draw would have dropped him into a tie for first. Finishes a half point ahead of Fabiano Caruana, who will challenge Magnus Carlsen for the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1363,25,12],"tags":[2181,2611,2374,867,533,372,589],"class_list":["post-5294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-news","category-people","category-tournaments","tag-awesomeness","tag-fabiano-caruana","tag-history","tag-magnus-carlsen","tag-sam-shankland","tag-us-championship","tag-world-championship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5294"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5296,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5294\/revisions\/5296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}