So settles for draw, shares Corus lead with 3 others

Grandmaster Wesley So tried to find a winning combination but had to settle for a draw against GM Friso Nijboer of The Netherlands in a crucial 11th round encounter in the 73rd Tata Steel-Corus Group B chess championship in Wijk Aan Zee, The Netherlands. So failed to capitalize on his positional and material advantage early in the match and agreed to halve the point with the lower-rated but hard-fighting Nijboer in a marathon 80 moves of the King’s Indian Samish variation at the de Morianne Community Center. Although he had a clear advantage in a rook-knight versus rook ending, the 17-year-old Filipino chess phenom could not shake off the Dutch player to eventually settle for his second straight draw in the prestigious 14-player, category-17 tournament. Before splitting the point, So tried to force an exchange of the major pieces as he broke down the Dutch GM’s kingside defenses with his more active queen. But the 45-year-old Nijboer, who became a GM in 1996, found the correct counter-attacks to force So to a queen exchange in the 47th move. So is now tied for the lead with GMs Luke McShane of England, David Navara of the Czech Republic and Zahar Efimenko of Ukraine with 7.0 points with still two rounds left. So, who topped Group C in 2009 and finished tied for fourth to fifth places in Group B last year, hopes to earn a win against McShane in a 12th-round showdown that could determine the champion of this 13-round competition. So will end his campaign against Polish GM Radek Wojtaszek. – JVP, KY, GMANews.TV