The World Open is the first international tournament that Le Quang Liem attends since his supreme finish at the 2017 HDBank International Chess Tournament last March.

After claiming three easy wins in his opening matches over much lower ranked players, namely Robby Adamson (elo 2,212), Pavel Blatny (2,394) and Andrew Tang (2,461), Liem faced a sterner challenge by Aleksandr Lenderman (2,585) in the fourth round.

Despite beating the US grandmaster twice at the 2015 Millionaire Chess Tournament, Liem, playing as black, proactively held Lenderman to a draw in this meeting.

The fifth round concluded on the morning of July 3 (Hanoi time), with Liem, this time playing as white, finishing off Jianchao Zhou of China (2,595), the only player to win the first four matches, and overtaking his opponent at the top of the standings.

After five games, top seeded Liem is leading the title race with 4.5 points, the same as American GM Yaroslav Zherebukh (2,642), who performed exceptionally to beat Fabiano Caruana (2,807) at the recent US chess championships.

The World Open features many elo-based categories of competition with a total prize pot of US$225,000. Liem will stand to pocket US$20,000 if he is crowned the overall champion of the Open section.

The tournament, which is taking place from June 30 to July 5, functions as a buffer for Liem to reclaim his form after being absent from top-tier international competitions for a long period of time, as he focused on his academic studies at Webster University in the US.

It also helps the Vietnamese star to warm up in preparation for the 8th Hainan Danzhou Super Grandmaster Chess Tournament, to be held in China from July 8 to 19. The 11-day event will be a 10-player round-robin, featuring Ding Liren, Yu Yangyi, Wei Yi, Wang Hao and Lu Shanglei from China, and Le Quang Liem, Malakhov, Ponomariov, Ivanchuk and Naiditsch from abroad.