So suffers 1st loss after 54 matches, slides to 3rd

MANILA, Philippines -- Grandmaster Wesley So suffered a painful 111-move defeat at the hands of Dutch GM Anish Giri in their Catalan duel that dealt a big blow to his title chances in the penultimate round of the 77th Tata Steel Masters in Wijk an Zee, The Netherlands Saturday night.

Playing black, the 21-year-old So's move to avoid the English Opening that Giri intiated backfired as the former waded into the latter's opening territory and readily seized the positional advantage and the initiative.

Under seige and in time pressure after relinquishing the open e and c files, So had to give up a pawn and tried to salvage a draw after the first time control in their queen and pawn endgame.

But when the dust settled, there was no stopping Giri, who is the youngest participant at age 20 years old, from promoting his passed pawn that gave him two queens against So's one.

The loss sent So sliding to third with 7.5 points while catapulting Giri to second with eight points, half a point behind Norweigian GM Magnus Carlsen, who drew with Chinese GM Ding Liren in 36 moves of a Queen's Pawn Torre Attack, with 8.5 points.

Ding joined So and French GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, who escaped with a 33-move draw with last year's winner GM Levon Aronian of Armenia, in their Queen's Pawn game encounter.

The loss was So's first loss after 54 games. His last defeat came at the hands of GM Fidel Corrales-Jimenez in last year's St. Louis Open.

It was also So's first defeat to Giri after the two fought to draws in the Group C of this same event in 2009 and in Group A last year.

It's not the end of the world though for So as he remained at No. 7 in the world with a live rating of 2783.8 and could improve further if he could beat another Dutch GM Loek Van Wely in the final round, which was being played at presstime.

And maybe, just maybe, So could end up winning it all if the stars aligned.

That is if So could beat Van Wely, Carlsen loses to Croatian GM Ivan Saric, Giri draws or loses to Polish GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek and he beats Carslen and Giri via the tiebreaker.

First things first, So will need to beat Van Wely.