Wesley earns place among world’s best

MANILA, Philippines - Grandmaster Wesley So proved his mettle playing against the world’s best by placing joint second behind reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen in the super-strong 77th Tata Steel Masters in Wijk an Zee Sunday night.

So posted a smashing win over Dutch GM Loek Van Wely in the final round to end up with 8.5 points on five wins and seven draws against a lone loss and into a four-way logjam at No. 2 with French GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Dutch GM Anish Giri and Chinese GM Ding Liren.

Norwegian Carlsen topped the Category 20 tournament considered as the Wimbledon of chess with nine points, just a half point ahead of the So-led pack.

Two of So’s wins came at the expense of Armenian GM Levon Aronian, the 2014 titlist, and Ukrainian GM Vassily Ivanchuk, a former World Challenger, while two of his draws were with Carlsen himself and World No. 2 GM Fabiano Caruana of Italy.

So gained a whopping 16.8 rating points from Tata which, together with the 8.7 points he gained from topping the North American Open in Las Vegas late last year, would catapult him from No. 10 to No. 7 in next week’s FIDE rating list with a new rating of 2787.5.

The Cavite-born former Webster University standout will also overtake GM Hiraku Nakamura as the highest rated woodpusher from the US with the latter sliding from No. 9 to No. 10.

Carlsen himself took notice of So.

“I think Caruana is the strongest player apart from me. Many of the other guys like Giri, So, Ding, Vachier-Lagrave are capable of winning games,” said Carlsen in the post-13th round presser.