US Championship 1996 — Parsippany

Fourteen players sat down for a 13-round round-robin at the Parsippany Hilton, and Alex Yermolinsky — a Leningrad-born grandmaster who had shared the US title with Alexander Shabalov three years earlier — won it alone this time, finishing 9/13 with just a single loss. It was a one-point margin over Boris Gulko and Gregory Kaidanov, and it closed out a tournament that had opened very differently: teenage prospect Tal Shaked led early, then fell away over the closing rounds.

◇A second title, won outright

Yermolinsky had first claimed the US championship in 1993 in a tie with Alexander Shabalov; in Parsippany he needed no one to share it with. His +6 −1 =6 line for 9/13 put him a full point clear of Gulko and Kaidanov, who tied for second on 8. Dmitry Gurevich took fourth on 7½, and Alexander Ivanov rounded out the top five on 7.

Born in Leningrad and a Soviet representative before switching to the United States in 1991, Yermolinsky had earned his grandmaster title in 1992 — Parsippany came at the peak of his American career, and it remains his last outright US championship win.

◇A bad week for the pre-tournament leader

The most striking early storyline belonged to Tal Shaked, the young Arizonan who would go on to win the World Junior Championship the following year. Shaked led the field through the opening rounds in Parsippany, but the closing stretch went badly: he finished twelfth on 5½, a result The Week in Chess described bluntly — he "did at least perform above his rating, but this was a bad week for him."

A US Women's Championship ran alongside the open event on the same dates at the same hotel; Anjelina Belakovskaia won that section by a point over Anna Akhsharumova (Gulko's wife), a coincidence that briefly put both halves of the Gulko household in Parsippany title contention.

“He did at least perform above his rating, but this was a bad week for him.”