US Championship 1993 — Long Beach

Twelve players, eleven rounds, and a title that would not be settled: Alexander Shabalov and Alex Yermolinsky both finished on 8/11 at Long Beach and shared the 39th US Championship. It was the first of Shabalov's four national titles and the first of Yermolinsky's two. Behind them, on 6½, came the one player in the field who had beaten both of them — Gata Kamsky.

◇The same score, two different tournaments

Shabalov and Yermolinsky arrived at the same number by opposite routes. Shabalov played the sharper event — seven wins, two losses, two draws — and Yermolinsky the steadier one, six wins and a single loss padded with four draws. Their individual game was drawn, so nothing separated them there either, and the championship went into the books shared.

Both losses on Shabalov's card came from inside the top half: Kamsky beat him in round ten, and Gregory Kaidanov had beaten him earlier. Yermolinsky's only defeat in eleven games was to Kamsky as well.

◇Kamsky's third place

Kamsky came to Long Beach as the highest-rated player in the field by some distance — the US Chess Federation's crosstable puts him at 2762 against Yermolinsky's 2725 and Shabalov's 2708 — and as the champion of 1991. He beat both of the men who would take the title, and beat them both with the black pieces, in rounds six and ten.

What cost him were losses to Kaidanov and to Larry Christiansen, who between them finished sixth and seventh. Kamsky ended a point and a half behind the co-champions on 6½.

◇The rest of the twelve

Patrick Wolff came in as the defending champion, having won at Durango a year earlier, and finished the event on 4½. Boris Gulko finished last of the twelve on 3½, drawing eight of his eleven games and winning none of them — and eleven months later he won the championship outright at Key West without losing a game.

This is a complete round robin and the archive preserves the whole of it: all sixty-six games.