Wesley So Wins 2016 Sinquefield Cup

My favorite chess tournament now has a new winner. Wesley So cruised through the tournament without a single loss, combining great opening preparation, strong tactics, and subtle positional understanding to win the cup.

He lead the field with half a point going into the last round. He quickly drew his game as the top seed Maxime Vachier-Lagrave could not set black any difficulties in the drawish Berlin Defense.

By far the longest game was between Topalov and Aronian, where the Bulgarian pressed in a rook ending but was unable to squeeze out a victory, which left him in a tie for second place.

Only two players won their games in the last round. Nakamura beat Ding Liren but was too far down in the standings to compete for the top places. However, he played one of the best games of the tournament with this miniature against the Chinese Grandmaster (and blitz #1!):

Caruana sacrificed two rooks for a queen and locked down Giri's position. To be fair to Giri, who had a poor tournament, at least he prevented Caruana from "doing a Giri" and drawing all his games!

In an extremely tense tournament with an extremely strong field, Wesley So was the deserving victor. Breaking through at the very start, he met all opponents and I congratulate him with a brilliant tournament. May this be a start of many succesful tournaments in his career.