Wesley So Wins 2021 Paris Rapid & Blitz

Leading from start to finish, GM Wesley So won the Paris Rapid & Blitz tournament as the best and most consistent player in the field. The American player secured the $37,500 first prize with a round to spare before beating his closest rival GM Ian Nepomniachtchi in the final round.

Paris Blitz | Final Standings

After he won the tournament, So revealed that he had considered Nepomniachtchi to be the favorite going into the final day, even though the Russian player was half a point behind him. Throughout the day, Nepomniachtchi kept the pace and stayed close behind, knowing that he would still face So in the final round—a great pairing, purely by chance.

As it went, that final round didn't even matter anymore. When Nepomniachtchi lost to GM Alireza Firouzja in the penultimate round, the gap was suddenly 1.5 points and it was all over. 

This meant that So "won" the second day of blitz with a score even better than Firouzja the other day: an undefeated 7/9. As we can see from the table above, the tournament winner won the two-day blitz segment with a 1.5-point margin over Firouzja, after winning the rapid as well. In the combined final standings his winning margin is three points:

Paris Rapid & Blitz 2021 | Combined Final Standings

So started with two draws today before beating GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. From a Symmetrical English, the game saw a knight tactic on d5 also known from the Sicilian, and from that moment, the Frenchman was on the defensive side:

Annotations by GM Dejan Bojkov will be added soon.

So lost only a single game in 36 rounds of chess in Bucharest and Paris: a blitz game yesterday against GM Levon Aronian. Today he took revenge, in the same line of the Ragozin that Aronian had played twice in Bucharest. It involved a double pawn sacrifice from White and after So won one back, Black should have been at least OK but then Aronian erred:

For completeness sake, here is So's win over Nepomniachtchi in the final round. It was clear that Nepo wanted to finish on a high note as he avoided a move repetition, but So countered all his activity with computer-like precision:

Firouzja once again attracted a lot of attention as he played eight decisive games on the final day. This time, they were only good for a 50 percent score.

One of his wins was against GM Vladimir Kramnik, who might have wished that the tournament had lasted two additional days (as he scored his only two wins in the last two rounds). Against Firouzja, the 14th world champion was winning at some point but as soon as he got into a problematic rook endgame, Firouzja found all the winning moves with just seconds on his clock:

A player who did quite well in the blitz was GM Richard Rapport, who tied for fourth place with Aronian in that segment and shared fifth in the overall standings with the same player. The Hungarian grandmaster was one of the players who beat Firouzja and he did so in a wild but theoretical line in the Sicilian Four Knights where, one move out of theory, White blundered a bishop and more adventures followed much later:

All games day 5

The Paris Rapid & Blitz took place June 18-22, 2021 in Paris. The time control in the rapid was 25 minutes for each player with a 10-second increment per move, starting from move one. The time control in the blitz was five minutes for each player with a two-second increment per move, starting from move one. The rapid counted double for the final standings. The tournament was the second leg of the Grand Chess Tour and has a $150,000 prize fund with a first prize of $37,500.

Previous reports:

• Paris Rapid & Blitz: So Leads, Firouzja Surges
• Paris Rapid & Blitz: So Leads, Nepomniachtchi Sacs
• Paris Rapid & Blitz Grand Chess Tour: Three-Way Tie With More Exciting Chess
• Firouzja Turns 18 As Paris Rapid & Blitz Grand Chess Tour Gets Underway