So So wasn’t so-so! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)
I tried to look up the winner of the Millionaire Open in Las Vegas this morning, and it wasn’t as easy as I expected to find out who won. When I went to chessbase.com, usually my first source, there was nothing about the playoffs. Next I went to the tournament page itself — but that page is a navigational disaster. There was no apparent way to find out who won the tournament!
Finally I had to resort to Google, which took me to Susan Polgar’s blog, which took me to the Chess24 website, which had an excellent article on the dramatic playoffs. The bottom line is that Wesley So, the Phillippine grandmaster who was the #1 seed in the tournament, beat Ray Robson. It was a lifetime achievement for both of them. So earns $100,000, the largest payday ever for a chess player in an open tournament. Robson wins $50,000, which is unbelievable, especially when you see how he earned it.
According to the Chess24 article, the final 25-minute game in the match was decided by So’s opening preparation. He and Robson know each other very well from Webster University (where Susan Polgar teaches) and they have played speed chess many times. So surely knows something about Robson’s openings. Smart guy, to have something saved up for Robson even though no one could have guessed that they would one day play with $100,000 on the line! So’s novelty on move 9 confused Robson enough that he simply hung a pawn on move 13, and then it was basically over.
Except…
Except with Robson it’s never over. In the last round of the “regular” tournament, he was absolutely crushed against Hungarian GM Daniel Berczes, two pawns down and with his position collapsing. But somehow he complicated it enough to confuse Berczes and actually managed to come back and win.
Then in the semifinal of the playoffs, same deal. Against Yangyi Yu Robson was again in a completely lost position. This was in fact the only game I watched, and I stopped watching around move 30 because it was so obvious that Yu was going to win. But Yu missed an easy-as-pie combination that would have gotten to a winning endgame, and instead let the game get complicated, and once again, somehow or other, Robson came out on top!
Once can be luck. Twice is not luck. Twice means that Robson is young, doesn’t get discouraged, and has nerves of steel. Still, by all rights Robson should have been playing for fifth place and $8000. Instead, thanks to those two incredible saves he made it to the championship match, with $50,000 guaranteed and a chance at $100,000.
But then he ran into his college friend So and was already a pawn down after 13 moves. Robson tried once again to complicate things, but the third time wasn’t the charm. So wasn’t having any of it, and cut Robson down with a pretty exchange sacrifice that left no doubt of the winner.
The third-place match, between Yu and Jianchao Zhou, went all the way to the Armageddon game before Yu won.
It’ll be interesting to see whether any of the players who went to Las Vegas for the Millionaire Tournament will stick around for another week and play in the Reno tournament next week. The stakes are much lower, “just” $2000 for first, but chess is chess. If you’re coming all the way from China, like Yu and Zhou, or from one of the other 45 countries who sent chess players to the Las Vegas tournament, why not stick around another week and play some more chess?
