19-year-old Awonder Liang crushed Levon Aronian today in the fifth round of the US Chess Championship. Awonder successfully surprised Aronian by playing the Scotch gambit and achieved the completely winning position after only 16 moves of play (Replay the game here). “I feel ecstatic, it’s not something I ever expected, just a lot of things kind of went my way“, said the 15-year-old in the post-game interview.
Awonder revealed that he got inspired to play the Scotch gambit by his University Professor who is an avid amateur chess player. “I was having dinner with the professor of UofC [University of Chicago] and he just started chess maybe a year or two years ago and he is super into it. But the one thing he loves the most is all these crazy gambits. And he was telling me Awonder you gotta play this gambit! It wasn’t this particular gambit (…) but I never would have imagined I’d play the Scotch gambit if it wasn’t for him!“. See the complete interview below
