Ray Robson scored a hat-trick at the US Chess Championship as he defeated Elshan Moradiabadi in today’s eighth round of the event. With an impressive score of 5.5/8 points, Robson passed the 2700 rating on the live rating list and now holds the second position in the 2022 US Championship, trailing GM Fabiano Caruana by half a point. In today’s post-game interview, Ray spoke about his chess goals revealing that in 2014 he set three long-term goals he wanted to achieve: “I think around 2014 I decided that, maybe I will never achieve my full potential, but I had three long-term goals I wanted to achieve in my career. One was to medal with the US team at the Olympiad, which back then seemed it would be very difficult even though we had a strong team and very good team chemistry. I was very fortunate to get in the 2016, 2018 teams which did medal. And the other two (goals) were to reach 2700 and win US Chess Championship. And it seems like the US Championship is the hardest one to achieve“.
Speaking about what is going to come after he achieves all the goals, Ray said that he would like to compete in super grandmaster tournaments on a more regular basis: “I would like to get into some of these elite events, so obviously I need to raise my rating up to probably at least 2730 to have some chance to get invited to some of the very highest events. It would just be nice to play in super tournaments, I haven’t really had that opportunity“. See the complete interview below
