Ivanchuk keeps Torre title

After he had won the prestigious blitz tournament in Moscow last month, Vassily Ivanchuk also prolonged his title with blitz games at the Torre Memorial in Mexico. Because that's what the knockoutfase consisted of: blitz games ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú something we hadn't figured out yet from the tournament website. Ivanchuk beat the Indian Harikrishna 3-1 in the final.

The time control in the tiebreak was 10 minutes plus 5 seconds per move increment for the first two games, and in case of a 1-1 score real blitz with 5 minutes plus 1 second increment per move was played.

As reported before, Ivanchuk started the tournament beating Bruzon 1?Ǭ?-?Ǭ?. In the quarterfinals he eliminated Almeida with the same figures but then he needed his blitz skills to conquer Graf, who had kept him on 1-1 in the sem-final rapids. Harikrishna had reached the final beating Hernandez, Meier and Nogueiras.

It was pretty hard to find the basic tournament set-up and the results, and we couldn't find the games in PGN on the official website. (What else is there, we can hear you thinking ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú actually quite a lot!) Here are the final two blitz games, manually copied:



The final