Quang Liem won the Biel Super Tournament for the third consecutive time

For the second time in the 56-year history of the Biel Supertournament, a player has won the title for the third time in a row, after Maxime Vachier-Lagrave from 2013-2016. If he draws Praggnanandhaa, Quang Liem only needs to draw the final game with Haik Martirosyan to be sure of winning the title. However, the 33-year-old player did more than that, when he played black and beat the Indian prodigy on the evening of July 24 and won the title regardless of the result of the final game with Martirosyan on July 25.

Quang Liem dominated Praggnanandhaa from the middlegame, when the game was more about position than complex calculations. The 19-year-old entered the tournament with a career-high ranking of eighth in the world and needed to beat Quang Liem to keep his hopes of winning the title alive. However, the defending champion took advantage of his advantage, capturing more than one pawn, and using the black bishop to block all moves of the white knight in the endgame. The Vietnamese representative then sacrificed the bishop, using the king to capture the white pawns, threatening to block the game, forcing Praggnanandhaa to concede after 65 moves.

This victory helped Quang Liem earn four more points, raising his total score in the tournament to 29.5, 5.5 points more than second-placed Martirosyan. There is only one round left in the tournament, and a player can only earn a maximum of four points, so no one can catch up with Vietnam's number one player.

Quang Liem also achieved the highest coefficient of his career, with current Elo of 2,741.6., 2,741.3 points higher than his previous peak. He also climbed one place to 16th in the world, only 3.4 Elo behind Chess King Dinh Lap Nhan.

In the final match, taking place from 7pm on Thursday, July 25, Hanoi time, Quang Liem will play against Martirosyan with the black pieces. If he wins this match, the Vietnamese player will earn 4 more Elo points, reaching 2,746, surpassing the King of Chess on the FIDE rankings, and returning to the world's top 15. Therefore, this match may not be a formality.

For the past few years, Quang Liem has not played standard chess regularly, due to his busy work as Director of the SPICE Chess Academy in the US. He only participates in the annual Biel tournament, and some tournaments of the Vietnamese chess team, to maintain his position on the FIDE rankings.

The Biel Chess Festival has been held annually in Switzerland since 1968, with past champions such as Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen. With the emergence of more super tournaments in recent years, top players no longer come to Biel as before. This year's tournament has 6 players, of which only Praggnanandhaa is ranked in the world's top 10. But with the average Elo of the six players this year being 2,693, this can still be considered a super tournament.