Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son won third place in the Olympic Esports Series

Truong Son and nine other players, most of them Grandmasters, participated in the OES finals on June 24 and 25 in Singapore, divided into two groups of five players each. In the group stage, Truong Son defeated Goh Wei Ming 3-0, Oleksandr Bortnyk 3-1, tied Tin Jingyao 2-2 and lost to Maksim Chigaev 1-3. That result helped the Vietnamese representative finish second in the group, behind Chigaev, and enter the semi-finals with this player.

Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son (right), Maksim Chigaev (left) and Alexey Sarana received the top three awards of the Olympic Esports Series 2023 in Singapore on June 25.

In the semi-finals, Truong Son lost to Alexey Sarana 1.5-2.5 and missed the chance to enter the finals. He had to play the third place match with the world's 142nd ranked player Rakhmanov.

Against an opponent with a lower Elo, Truong Son lost the second game when he lost all his pieces. In the fourth game, holding the black pieces and forced to win, the second Vietnamese player completed his mission well when he took advantage of small advantages to turn them into victories.

The match was forced into a do-or-die armageddon, with Truong Son holding the white pieces and having five minutes, while Rakhmanov received the black pieces and only three minutes. But the Vietnamese player had to win, as neither had any time to add. Truong Son had a pawn advantage for most of the game, but lost his bishop in the endgame. However, he pushed his queenside pawn to put pressure, forcing Rakhmanov to make a mistake. White promoted the queen and won after 89 moves.

The Olympic Esports Series is a virtual sports tournament initiated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and held for the first time in 2023. There are nine sports in the tournament, including archery, baseball, chess, cycling, dance, motor sports, sailing, tennis and taekwondo, all competed in a virtual environment. The chess qualifiers had many top players such as Alireza Firouzja and Hikaru Nakamura, but they did not participate in the finals.

Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son was born in 1990 in Kien Giang, and was the U10 World Champion in 2000. He won eight SEA Games gold medals and two individual gold medals on board two at the 2014 and 2018 Chess Olympiad. He currently has an Elo of 2,645, ranking 116th in the world, second in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

According to VnExpress