Fairy tale run over

Malakhov ends So’s fairy tale run in World Chess Cup
12/03/2009 02:14 PM

KHANTY-Mansiysk, Russia – Filipino Grandmaster Wesley So’s fairy tale-like campaign in the 2009 World Chess Cup finally came to an end Wednesday.

So, dubbed by the foreign chess media here as the “biggest sensation in the tournament,” lost all his three rapid tiebreak matches to GM Vladimir Malakhov of Russia in their fourth round showdown and bowed out of contention at the Khanty-Mansiysk Center of Arts.

The 16-year-old Filipino, whose strong positional games during the prestigious, 128-player competition earned him comparison with former world champion Anatoly Karpov, failed to shake off the older and more-experienced Malakhov in the first two classical games.

It was a divergence from his stints at the previous rounds, where he stunned former world championship finalist GM Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine and defending champion GM Gata Kamsky of the US both in two games.

Slowed down by two hard-fought draws in their classical games, So was forced to battle it out with the 22nd-seeded Malakhov (ELO 2706) in the rapid tiebreak stage. But the Filipino, who was once quoted by foreign journalists here that he prefers to play in tiebreaks, could “not oversee that Malakhov feels completely at home in rapid.”

The final score: 4-1 for Malakhov.

Despite his failure to reach the Last Eight phase, So earned US$30,000 (about P1.46 million) in prize money by making it to the round-of-16, the first-ever Filipino player to do so.

Child’s play over

“Children’s time is over. Goodbye, young talents. Your Khanty-Mansiysk fairy tale is over,” said the official World Cup website in its Dec. 3 entry.

Here is the full article.