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GM Wesley So won a surprisingly one-sided match against GM Levon Aronian in the round of 16 of the 2023 Chess.com Speed Chess Championship Presented by Coinbase. The final score was 15.5-12.5, but the margin was greater than five points for most of the match.
In the Quarterfinals, So will play the winner of the GM Dmitry Andreikin vs. Alireza Firouzja match.
The next round of 16 match is GM Nihal Sarin vs. Alexey Sarana, which starts on Wednesday, September 6, at 12:00 p.m. ET / 18:00 CEST / 21:30 IST.
So led their previous bitz head-to-head encounters with a score of 7-4, with 14 draws. This was their first time meeting in the SCC ever and they’d never played bullet games against each other yet.
The match was expected to be close. But, after a disastrous first segment, SmarterChess gave Aronian just a 5% chance of match victory. Reality aligned with the prediction.
So’s outstanding score in the first segment propelled him to victory despite minor setbacks in the other two. Although Aronian won the last two portions by small margins, he was unable to dig himself out of the hole.
5+1: Aronian 1.5-7.5 So
Despite two draws to start the match, the first two games were anything but tranquil. So threw the kitchen sink at Aronian in the first game, sacrificing a knight and then a rook, but it ended in threefold repetition; Aronian had some pressure in the next middlegame with White, but it also petered out.
The first blood was drawn in game three, with a win for So. It was also the beginning of a five-game winning streak that would carry him through to glory for the rest of the match.
It was a great first win, but it was more importantly the start of a psychological trend that Aronian was unable to shake for approximately the next three hours. The kingside knight ended up on the sad h8-square, and this same knight also fell victim to the final, dazzling tactic.
GM Rafael Leitao annotates all of it, the Game of the Day, below.
That was just the beginning of the rampage. Especially crushing was game five, the shortest victory, in which So won in 28 moves with the black pieces. It was just an opening disaster after Aronian’s 14.Ng1?, a novelty—and a losing one. It was another case of a poor horse, and fittingly, it got trapped in the end.
After the Filipino-American won in game seven and took a 6-1 lead, Rensch foreshadowed that this would most likely be Aronian’s first time losing in the first round of the SCC—and that’s what happened.
In game eight, Aronian achieved his first winning position in the match but was held to a draw anyway. The segment ended with a 7.5-1.5 score in favor of So, prompting Rensch to rename the grandmaster “Dubley So,” after the number of “dubs” (wins) he achieved.
3+1: Aronian 5-4 So
In the last 15 minutes of the 5+1 portion, Rensch said: “Wesley So is gonna get better as the time controls get faster.” Although that didn’t fully pan out, So’s lead from the previous one gave him more than enough of a buffer.
After a draw, So won the second game of the segment. After a bishop sacrifice, Rensch announced: “This game will be over in three moves. Count it… OK, I’m wrong, I’m sorry, the game’s over in one move.”
But then came serious resistance. Aronian earned his first victory in the match in the next game, which ended abruptly after, in an equal position, Black traded his kingdom for a pawn.
Aronian won the following game too, making it two in a row, and was gaining some momentum—until he threw away a significant advantage in the subsequent game. Rensch summarized what happened: “You’re mounting a comeback, you’ve won two games in a row, and you blunder your queen in one move.”
Levon Aronian goes through all the stages of grief in a couple of seconds as he blunders his queen just when he was battling to score a 3rd win in a row! #SpeedChess pic.twitter.com/jLVRj5gFlN
— chess24.com (@chess24com) September 5, 2023
Even though Aronian was able to win two more out of the next four games, the segment still ended with a five-point lead for So. As it was for Sysiphus, this mountain would be tough to climb.
1+1: Aronian 6-4 So
Although So allowed his lead to dwindle down to “only” three points, he got the job done.
For Aronian fans, the first game was a promising one. After he won with two pigs on the seventh rank, Rensch took a sip of water and asked the audience, “Are you ready for a thriller?”
The thriller sort of happened as Aronian got closer to evening the score than he did in the whole match, but it still wasn’t close.
Four more black wins followed the first. So’s win in game two of the bullet segment featured a nice “switchback,” where he first threatened to win a pawn on a3, but after White’s response, brought his rook back to deliver a forced checkmate.
With 15 minutes left, So still had a five-point lead. As it sometimes does, the conversation about whether Aronian could mathematically return started to come up.
So regains his five-point lead and it’s unlikely Aronian will be able to come back with just over 15 minutes left.#SpeedChess pic.twitter.com/6kYAE9FwSs
— chess24.com (@chess24com) September 5, 2023
Despite allowing the match to finish with a “mere” three-point difference in scores, So finished comfortably. His record since 2018 continues; including this year, he has never lost in the first round of an SCC.
So earns $4,660.71 while Aronian takes home $1,339.29 by win percentage.
Bracket
All Games | Aronian vs. So | Round Of 16
The main event of the 2023 Speed Chess Championship Presented by Coinbase takes place September 4-22. It is the strongest online speed chess contest in the world, with 16 players—12 invited and four qualifiers—vying for a share of the $150,000 prize fund along with one of the most prestigious titles in online chess.
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