Peers: New U.S. champ continues to get better

MINNETONKA, MINN. » This ruthless man is very tranquil. He falls asleep easily around the world in seats unsuited for sleeping. He giggles a child’s treble giggle when you don’t expect. He asks charming novice questions about baseball. He can speak measuredly at length or speak not at all, while sanguine with either. His capable wit emerges only on soft occasion. Chess people rave about his surpassing calm.

It seems the only place to avoid Wesley So would be the other side of a chessboard. There, he will take his tranquility and shred you with it. There, he seems to avoid grimacing, or sighing, or running his hands through his hair, or all the things people tend to do when presented with high ambition, time limits and the eternal 64-square puzzle.

So has risen, at 23, to No. 2 in the world, lodged behind only 26-year-old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, who has been No. 1 for almost the whole 2010s. At the barbaric board, So has stormed into a realm found by only 11 other humans, a peak Elo rating of above 2800, a mastery of a game so bloody violent.

“Oh, it’s a violent game!” said Lotis Key, So’s adoptive mother, formerly a movie actress in the Philippines who immigrated to the United States in the 1980s. “Extremely. I say this game has an undercurrent of violence that is unsurpassed in any ball sport. It’s a very violent game, very aggressive ... This is, once you start, someone’s got to die here. And on his level, even a draw is a small death, because he loses points when he draws. When you’re that high, drawing is like losing.”

In this savage pursuit, So, a calm native Filipino who plays under the U.S. federation — and credits the latter with enabling his upsurge — won 67 matches in a row in elite play from last July to this April. He won major events in St. Louis (August) and London (December) and the Netherlands (January), then won the U.S. championship in St. Louis in April. He won and won without bombast, even if his knight-takesF2 move in a round in April in St. Louis did stoke rapture from all those people who know precisely

cisely why a knight-takesF2 move could stoke rapture. With fellow bright lights Fabiano Caruana (No. 4 in the world) and Hikaru Nakamura (No. 9), So has helped make one hell of an American chess era while still not American just yet. He did all this while waking sometimes in his adoptive home here and getting going on his eight hours of chess study such that his adoptive mother tells him, “You should really wash your face first.”

“‘Oh, okay,’” Key quotes So’s usual response, as she sits across the cafe table from him at a library near Minneapolis.

His own voice sounds calming, soothing, something you might prefer on the radio if you wake in the wee hours, as when he says, “It’s my first time winning the U.S. championship, so I feel like I accomplished something, hopefully, because all the great local players starting in the early 1920s have won this tournament, and I’d never won it yet. So right now I’m, by rating, the number-one player in the U.S., but I feel if I didn’t win the U.S. championship, it’s not validating my profession.”

With the profession further validated, they completed the post-tournament hubbub, made arrangements to depart St. Louis, got the taxi to the plane, stood in line, boarded, took off and only then, Key said, “He’ll turn to me, and say, ‘Oh my, I actually won it.’ We were on our way to Azerbaijan.”

Even among the chessinitiated, So’s calm stands out.

“There’s almost a seeming effortlessness to his ascent that’s a bit surprising to me,” said Daniel Lucas, the director of publications at the United States Chess Federation. “I think about Joe DiMaggio or Roger Federer who make what they do look easy, when what they’re doing is extraordinarily hard.”

“I wouldn’t say like a machine, but he is very precise, very precise, and I think that’s something unique about him,” said Alexander Onischuk, the American grandmaster from Ukraine who coaches the chess team at Texas Tech, and who opposed So in the U.S. final in April. “He doesn’t make big mistakes. He makes minor mistakes from time to time. We all do. But I’ve never seen him make a big mistake, a big blunder. That is very impressive. And look, all his results are very stable.”

“It always looks like he’s half playing the game and half thinking about a pleasant memory,” said Tony Rich, the executive director of the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis, the organizing body for the U.S. title event. Rich finds So “self-effacing,” and fancies a story of when So played a posttournament exhibition last year against consensus best-player-ever Garry Kasparov, and Kasparov looked the more theatrical of the two. “He doesn’t try to play the flashy move just to make everyone happy,” Rich said. “He plays very concretely. He just seems to play the right move at the right time.”

Thus did Kasparov tweet last December, in congratulating So on the Grand Chess Tour win in London, “He showed great consistency and, bad news for opponents, he’s still improving.”

On Thursday, So and Key made off for Norway and then a binge of events in Europe. It’s plausible that over the Atlantic, he contorted himself into some posture that allowed for sleep, and slept. “Oh my gosh,” Key said. “When we’re on our way to church in the car - yeah, he can fall asleep anywhere, anytime, night or day, within seconds. And everybody starts laughing in the car” - that includes Key’s husband, Renato Kabigting, and their daughter, Abbey - “because we can see Wesley’s head. He’ll be talking and then the sudden ...” She droops her head. “And we’re all like [whispering]. I always say he must have a good conscience somewhere in there, because he does not struggle with complete blackout.”

“Do you dream about chess?” “Never,” he said. After a brief discussion on sleep — he also does so in taxis, lounges, so on — it comes up that he’s No. 2 in a world of seven billion.

“Well, not all of them play chess,” he deadpans.

Then: “Well, I never thought I would be number two. But now that I’m here, I want to try to be number one. I’m not entirely satisfied with number two. I mean, I’m very happy to get there, but I hope I can reach further.”