Vietnamese grandmaster Le Quang Liem (Elo 2,697) extended his unbeaten run to seven games at the ongoing 2015 SPICE Cup Open chess tournament in the US after playing out a seventh-round draw with his Webster University teammate Aleksandr Shimanov (Elo 2,593) on October 21 local time.

It was Liem’s third draw thus far in this year’s event, following the previous ones against US players, Konstantin Kavutskiy (Elo 2,349) in round one and Akshat Chandra (Elo 2,506) in round six.

Sharing points with Shimanov, Liem held on to the second-place position with 5.5 points, just behind leader Shimanov due to an inferior sub-index.

In the second last round scheduled today, the Vietnamese star continues to be challenged by another US player, Samuel Sevian (Elo 2,556), who is holding five points after seven matches.

A good result against Sevian will work crucially on Liem’s overall ranking in this year’s SPICE Cup event.

The US$15,000 tournament, sponsored by Webster University and the Susan Polgar Foundation, is taking place from October 17 to 22, with 45 masters rated over 2,100 competing in a nine-round Swiss tournament for the US$5,000 Open title.

As top seed of the Open category, Liem is looking towards securing the 2015 title to redeem his poor performance in the last two editions where he failed to make the top three.

Nhan Dan