Ivanchuk also takes World Blitz Ch

Vassily Ivanchuk's last big goal in an already amazing year is of course winning the World Cup in Khanty-Mansyisk (first round next Saturday) but a nice foretaste is his title of world blitz champion, which he gained today in Moscow by winning an amazingly strong 20-player double round-robin tournament with 25.5 points out of 38 games. Second was Vishy Anand (24.5), who had an off-day yesterday but played like a world champ today, and third was last year's winner Alexander Grischuk (23.5).

The event had started with 64 players in the preliminaries on Tuesday and Wednesday, who fought for 6 places in the World Blitz Championship, which run yesterday and today. Kasimdzhanov, Bacrot, Adams, Savchenko, Ponomariov, Dreev and Rublevsky had qualified and together with Anand, Karpov, Morozevich, Grischuk, Svidler and all Tal Memorial participants they would play the final group. Surprisingly two of the younger players, Jakovenko and Alekseev, chose for some rest because of the World Cup, and at the very last moment Svidler got ill and was replaced by Korotylev.

After the first day Ivanchuk was leading the field with 13.5 out of 19, followed by Grischuk (13), Kamsky (12,5) and Leko (12). Today it was really nerve-racking, because after 37 rounds Ivanchuk and Anand (who made a fantastic come-back) were both on 24.5 points. The tournament was decided by a huge blunder by Vishy, who had apparently used all his energy to get this far on the second day. He allowed a knight fork and it was immediately over. Here the decisive game, in the game viewer and on a video by Europe-Echecs:





Many more videos can be found at Europe-Echecs. All games can be downloaded here in PGN.

Final standings:

[TABLE=29]

And here some photos (by Anna Burtasovoy):

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"155","attributes":{"alt":"","title":"","class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","wysiwyg":1}}]] Vassily Ivanchuk (against Boris Gelfand)

Boris Gelfand with Vishy & Aruna Anand

Alexander Grischuk

Vladimir Kramnik - Peter Leko

Magnus Carlsen

Michael Adams

Alexander Morozevich - Vishy Anand

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"163","attributes":{"alt":"","title":"","class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","wysiwyg":1}}]] Alexei Shirov being interviewed