
The second phase of the online tournament, the Play-In, featured 174 players competing for 8 spots in the final knockout stage, where they would join the likes of Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura in a 16-player double-elimination bracket. The Play-In consisted of a 9-round Swiss tournament with a 10+0 time control, followed by a knockout phase.
Wei Yi won the Swiss event after scoring 7/9 points and securing better tiebreak scores than Yu Yangyi, Dmitry Andreikin and Lu Shanglei. As a result, Wei Yi obtained a direct spot in the final stage, while the players who finished in 2nd-15th places competed in two-game matches to determine the remaining seven qualifiers.
Out of the seven placement matches, five were decided in Armageddon following a 1-1 score in the two-game match. The biggest surprise came from Sam Sevian, who knocked out Maxime Vachier-Lagrave after winning the sudden-death tiebreaker with the black pieces. MVL's attack backfired in the deciding game, as he sacrificed material to open lines on the kingside with 19.Nxh6
Black emerged a piece up as White's attack soon faltered - Black had everything under control after 27...Rg6
Besides Wei Yi and Sevian, the other players who gained a spot in the final phase were Yu Yangyi, Anish Giri, Andrey Esipenko, Jan-Krzysztof Duda, Vladislav Artemiev and Alexander Grischuk.
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