Showing the stuff he is made of

Friday March 4, 2011
A true chess champion
CHESS
By QUAH SENG SUN

Vietnam’s Le Quang Liem shows the stuff he is made of.

IF a champion is someone who has won a competition, how would you define a true champion? To me, it’s very easy: a true champion is one who successfully defends a title won in the previous competition.

There aren’t many such champions around but one that comes to mind in recent chess history is Vietnam’s leading grandmaster, Le Quang Liem.

Le is 20 years old. At this age in chess, one may be considered a veteran at the game already. In 2005 when Le was 14, he became the Under-14 world youth chess champion. In 2006 and 2008, he played in the Vietnamese national team at the Chess Olympiads.

In February last year, he was a joint winner of the Moscow open tournament and he then immediately followed up this performance with an equally impressive victory at the ninth Aeroflot open chess tournament in Moscow.

So we know that Le is capable of winning some pretty strong chess tournaments. But is he a true champion? By my reckoning, yes. Just last month, he repeated his feat at the 10th edition of the Aeroflot open. Although technically, Le and two other players finished with equal points at the top, the Vietnamese was adjudged the winner on a better tie-break.

Despite being the defending champion, Le did not enter the tournament as the top seed. Indeed, he was over-shadowed so much by the higher-ranked players that he started this tournament only as the 19th seed.

The top seed was the Russian-born American grandmaster, Gata Kamsky, and then there were also Sergei Movsesian, Dmitry Jakovenko, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Nikita Vitiugov who dominate the world chess ranking list.

But the chess goddess can sometimes smile on the underdogs and in this case, she smiled on Le. While the seeds above him fell off one by one, he played steadily to gain ground on his rivals. He was helped by great results in his first four games which he won, and one of them, in the fourth round, was against no other than Kamsky himself.

More here.