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Michigan Chess
All of my tournaments for the forseeable future will be in Michigan against mostly if not exclusively Michigan players, so I thought I'd include a bit about the current state of the game.
By far the current star is FM Seth Homa, who is still fairly young(23) and has begun to have success against IMs and GMs the second half of this year. Aaron Kahn is an experienced master who has been at that level for several years, but has not progressed significantly. In the prodigy department, 15-year-old Atulya Shetty was the youngest player ever to win the Michigan Open this last year, going undefeated with five wins and two draws, and is already a solid master with a USCF rating hovering at about 2300.
On a more macro scale, Michigan has somewhat fewer top players than one would expect for a state of it's size, and also a bit less than it's proportional share of chess players overall. There are a little over 1300 active in the state, out of less than 49k nationwide. So it's a slightly favorable competitive environment.
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