ST. LOUIS – Wesley So will have to win a tiebreaking playoff Monday if he's to become the U.S. chess champion, and an exhausted college student with a class project due in the morning is partly responsible for that.
So, a 23-year-old grandmaster from Minnetonka, had a shockingly short game in the final round of the championship on Sunday. Instead of a typical four- or five-hour clash of minds, it was over in 17 minutes.
It was a draw — not what So was hoping for, and it left him waiting hours to learn his fate. But it turned out to be enough to secure a tie for first place and a spot in a head-to-head, two-game playoff.
The 14-move draw was a result of So's opening choice and his opponent's rare decision not to fight. So had the black pieces and chose an opening called the Berlin Defense, a line so hard for white to crack that it's nicknamed the Berlin Wall.
To So's surprise, his opponent chose not to even try. Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, a 21-year-old student at Stanford University, opted for a variation that left So with no choice but to make moves leading to an immediate draw. To do otherwise, So would have had to accept a losing position.
The choices of both players set off a raging debate among chess experts and average players about who bore responsibility for the tepid game — So for choosing the Berlin, or Naroditsky for refusing to battle.
Naroditsky admitted after the game that he was exhausted after nearly two weeks of grueling games. "To be frank, I'm a bit out of gas at this point," he said in a postgame interview on the live-stream broadcast from the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis.
He also said he had a project due in the morning for his Mathematical Foundations of Computing class and was facing an all-nighter. He decided "it would not be a huge crime to do something that's perhaps somewhat unprofessional, but in my view is fully within my rights."
