The last battle of the entire 2022 FIDE Grand Prix series organised by World Chess has finished on the 4th of April. In the final match tiebreaker, Wesley So outplayed Hikaru Nakamura by a score of 1½:½ and won the third leg of the Grand Prix in Berlin. The tournament winner and the runner-up looked happy at the closing ceremony as both of them could celebrate the success in the tournament. Despite the result of the final match, Hikaru Nakamura qualified for the FIDE Candidates Tournament 2022 and became the overall winner of FIDE Grand Prix Series 2022. Richard Rapport, who is the second in the overall standings and also punched his ticket to the Candidates, while Wesley So took third place in the Series.
After the match ended, Wesley So said: “I am only 28, and I’m hoping that next year or in a couple of years, I will get a chance to play in the Candidates. The last time I played, I was very inexperienced and finished second to last, so I think if you qualify, you have to be ready to fight for first place.”
Hikaru Nakamura: “The odds [of winning the whole series] were probably 10-15% before everything began. I was quite fortunate in the first leg as I got players who hadn’t played as much; they weren’t sharp.”
FIDE Grand Prix Series 2022 final standings:
Player | Berlin | Belgrade | Berlin | Total |
Hikaru Nakamura | 13 | 10 | 23 | |
Richard Rapport | 7 | 13 | 20 | |
Wesley So | 4 | 13 | 17 | |
Levon Aronian | 10 | 2 | 12 | |
Dmitry Andreikin | 10 | 10 | ||
Amin Tabatabaei | 3 | 7 | 10 | |
Shakhriyar Mamedyarov | 3 | 7 | 10 | |
Leinier Dominguez | 7 | 2 | 9 | |
Sam Shankland | 4 | 4 | 8 | |
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave | 7 | 1 | 8 | |
Anish Giri | 7 | 0 | 7 | |
Vidit Gujrathi | 3 | 4 | 7 | |
Nikita Vitiugov | 3 | 3 | 6 | |
Alexandr Predke | 3 | 1 | 4 | |
Grigoriy Oparin | 0 | 4 | 4 | |
Andrey Esipenko | 4 | 0 | 4 | |
Vincent Keymer | 0 | 4 | 4 | |
Radosław Wojtaszek | 4 | 4 | ||
Vladimir Fedoseev | 2 | 1 | 3 | |
Yu Yangyi | 0 | 3 | 3 | |
Daniil Dubov | 3 | 0 | 3 | |
Alexander Grischuk | 2 | 0 | 2 | |
Pentala Harikrishna | 2 | 0 | 2 | |
Etienne Bacrot | 0 | 2 | 2 | |
Alexei Shirov | 0 | 1 | 1 |