CHESS

Vassily Ivanchuk ran out clear champion at the Tal Memorial, “stealing” a tournament that Alexander Morozevich seemed to have in the bag midway. Moro led with 4.5 points after round 6. By then, the Russian GM had shot to no 1 on the Live Rating list.

In Round 7, Ivanchuk beat Moro in a heart-stopper where both players time-scrambled with less than 20 seconds for their last 10 moves. That win put the Ukrainian GM into first spot and he coolly drew his last two. That proved enough.

In round 8, Moro lost again, to Gata Kamsky, to knock himself out of contention for first place. The last round (9) featured several short draws with Ivanchuk standing a full point clear of the field. When all the scoresheets were signed, Ivanchuk was first with 6 while Moro, Kramnik, Gelfand and Ponomariov all ended tied for second with 5 points.

Kramnik had a reasonable warm up prior to the title contest with a score of +2,-1, =6 including an incredible loss to Morozevich. Later the challenger gave an interesting interview where he pointed out that his opening choices were delicately balanced, to ensure that he didn’t give too much away and kept his match opponent guessing.

The world women’s championship looks as though it will go ahead at Nalchik albeit without the participation of a dozen of the original invitees. The six Georgians cannot (and probably don’t want to!) play and several Westerners have also withdrawn due to unfavourable travel advisories.

The chances of Humpy, the top seed and favourite, should improve further with the weakened field Bilbao starts next Tuesday and will be world champion Anand’s last event before the title match. Anand faces Magnus Carlsen, Vassily Ivanchuk, Veselin Topalov, Teimour Radjabov and Levon Aronian in an interesting soccer scoring format of a double round robin with wins scored at 3 and draws at 1.

This places a huge premium on results since, for example, a score of +1,=9, is worth less than +5,-5 unlike with conventional scoring. Like Kramnik, Anand has an interesting job of managing his repertoire at Bilbao to keep Kramnik guessing.

THE DIAGRAM, WHITE TO PLAY (Morozevich Vs Kramnik, Tal Memorial 2008) is an amazingly unstable position. At first glance, material is equal and both kings are exposed so the verdict would be unclear. At second glance, white has a crushing attack. Morozevich found the very strong 30.Rd6! Rxd6 31. cxd6 (1-0) since 31. - Qxd6 and 31.

- Ng6 both lose to 31. Ra8+. In the initial position, 30.b5 also seems strong and even 30. Rxd8+ Kxd8 31. Qd3+ Ke8 32. Qd6 may work but 20. Rd6 is ruthless.