The USCF Grand Prix is a set of

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...

tournaments for prize money rated by the

United States Chess Federation The United States Chess Federation (also known as US Chess or USCF) is the governing body for chess competition in the United States and represents the U.S. in FIDE, the World Chess Federation. US Chess administers the official national rating ...

. In general, a tournament must have at least $300 in guaranteed prizes to award "Grand Prix" points. At the end of the year, prizes are awarded to players with the most points. The first prize is usually $10,000. These prizes provide incentives to grandmasters to play in small regional tournaments which they would otherwise avoid. The Grand Prix of chess was started in the 1980s by

Church's Chicken Church's Texas Chicken is an American fast food restaurant chain that specializes in fried chicken and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The chain was founded as Church's Fried Chicken To-Go by George W. Church Sr. on April 17, 1952, in San ...

. As a result, the points awarded at these tournaments were called "chicken points" and the tournaments at which these points were awarded was called the "Chicken circuit". As years passed, the sponsorship has changed. For several years the sponsor was Novag, a maker of

chess computers In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest. A chess engine is usually a back end with a command-line interface with ...

. Currently, the sponsor is ChessCafe. The late Grandmaster

Igor V. Ivanov Igor Vasilyevich Ivanov (January 8, 1947 – November 17, 2005) was a Russian-born Canadian grandmaster of chess and a concert pianist. Early life He was born in 1947 in Leningrad, USSR, and learned chess at age five. He studied music intensi ...

won the Grand Prix of chess nine times. In more recent years, the usual winner had been the late Grandmaster

Aleksander Wojtkiewicz Aleksander Wojtkiewicz ( lv, Aleksandrs Voitkevičs; January 15, 1963 – July 14, 2006) was a Polish chess grandmaster. He was born in Latvia. In his early teens he was already a strong player; a student of ex-world champion Mikhail Tal whom he ...

. Also, recently, a Grand Prix for younger chess players has been started, through the online chess site

World Chess Live The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a commercial Internet chess server devoted to the play and discussion of chess and chess variants. ICC had over 30,000 subscribing members in 2005.John Black, Martin Cochran, Martin Ryan Gardner"Lessons Learned ...

, with online tournaments where players earn points based on how they do.

References

External links

USCF Grand Prix standings
Chess competitions Chess in the United States {{chess-tournament-stub