Tani Adewumi gets required IM norm!

Tani Adewumi earned his fourth IM norm at the Southwest Open in Irving, Texas (outside of Dallas) last weekend. It was his first in an open tournament. Due to rule changes each player is required to have at least one of their GM/IM title norms earned in an open tournament. This reduces the chance of match-fixing and arranging dubious round robin events. Nevertheless, Tani has now earned the coveted norms and will continue hunting for GM norms.

Tani scored wins over GMs Emilio Cordova of Peru and Koustav Chatterjee of India and has made steady progress since receiving national attention back in 2019. Perhaps the first significant stepping stone was when he became a National Master back in May of 2021. A year later he earned the FM title. Tani went on to earn IM norms successively in April 2022 (New York), July 2022 (New York) and November 2022 (New York).

I secured my final IM norm at the southwest class championship in TX with an overall score at 5.5/9 last weekend. Our God is Awesome! pic.twitter.com/f8H9563qUe

— Tanitoluwa Adewumi (@TaniAdewumi) February 22, 2024

This last norm completes the norm requirements and he only has to get his FIDE rating over 2400. His peak rating is 2317 (March 2023), but rebounding from a year of inconsistent results to vault back over 2300. Getting the required FIDE rating is a challenge, but one bit of advice may be not to engage in counting points but to focus only on earning GM norms. If he continues to score (at a minumum) IM-level performances, the rating mountain will be scaled quickly. Following is an excerpt from the announcement on uschess.org.

Entering the tournament with a FIDE rating of 2280, Tani is still short the 2400 rating threshold for achieving his IM title. But, on the back of this performance, he has once again crossed 2300 in the live ratings while defeating two GMs and an IM on the way to a 5½/9 score. Fittingly, this result was also good for a share of the Under-2300 prize, which might be the last one of those he sees for a while.

~US Chess (JJ Lang)

FM Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi (2280-USA)
#	Player	ELO	Nation	Flag	Result
1	Aiden Leong	1936	Canada		1
2	GM Dambasuren Batsuren	2522	Mongolia		½
3	GM Emilio Cordova	2561	Peru		1
4	GM Koustav Chatterjee	2537	India		1
5	GM John Michael Burke	2582	USA		0
6	GM Cristhian Cruz	2498	Peru		0
7	IM Jason Wang	2453	USA		½
8	IM Tianqi Wang	2358	USA		1
9	IM Emil Stefanov	2530	Bulgaria		½
Score: 5½-3½ IM NORM)

Following are his two wins over Grandmasters:

Result: https://chessevents.com/event/southwestclass/2024/standings/master