Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Wesley So battled for the final spot in the semifinals of Chess.com’s Speed Chess Championship, and it was a strange match. So won the first game in good style, but then fell apart for the next seven games, making only two draws and losing five games. And then he stopped the bleeding. He won the last game of the 5’+1” to get back to within three points. Then he went +1 in the 3’+1” segment to close to within two, and then he went +2 in the first five games of the 1’+1” to even the match.
Amazing! Incredible! And then…he lost five in a row, and that was the end of that. A draw and a consolation win in the last game may have eased the pain a little, but it was still a shocking collapse after his gritty comeback. (You can watch the video here.)
MVL thus wins 16.5-11.5, and will face Magnus Carlsen in one semifinal, while Nihal Sarin will take on Hikaru Nakamura in the other. The Carlsen-MVL match will be especially interesting, as Carlsen has won every Speed Chess Championship match he has participated in over the years, except for one: a loss to Vachier-Lagrave in the semifinals of the 2020 edition.
As the year is drawing close to an end, with Christmas coming in 10 days and the World Rapid & Blitz Championships right after that, Chess.com is squeezing in the next matches right away: Nakamura vs. Sarin starts at 9 a.m. ET (15:00 CET) this morning (Thursday morning), and Carlsen-MVL gets underway at 1 p.m. ET (19:00 CET) on Friday, with the final next Tuesday, December 20, at 2 p.m. ET (20:00 CET).