Ivanchuk wins again

Perhaps it's a bit too early to start talking about it, already before the Wch in Mexico, but anway, Vassily Ivanchuk seems to have a decent chance to win his first Chess Oscar this year. He continued his amazing series of victories at the Montreal International where he finished first place in a strong round-robin a point clear. Nigel Short suffered the worst result ever in his professional chess career: 2 / 9.

We shouldn't be too suprised when we see Ivanchuk suddenly on the no. 2 spot of October's FIDE rating list. (At the moment his virtual rating is 2772.) My god what a summer he's having! To me in Montreal his victory over Sutovsky was the most impressive:



Short started with 0 out of 4, when he drew with Sutovsky. Then he lost to Charbonneau, drew with his old rival Kamsky, and then luckily showed the world that he's still capable of some good chess. He completely outplayed Eljanov with Black. But in the last round he had to suffer another defeat, in a very interesting King's Gambit against Mark Bluvshtein:



The Englishman must have been very happy that the tournament was over. But then he got a phone call by Frederic Friedel (Chessbase), who insisted in finding the reason behind Short's bad tournament. Well, then what you get is an accumulation of little grumbles and complaints about small irritations that, combined, led to his horrible tourney. But doesn't everybody experience such a drag once, at the tail of a career?

Final standings:

 1. Ivanchuk, Vassily    g UKR 2762 7.0
 2. Tiviakov, Sergei     g NED 2648 6.0
 3. Harikrishna, P       g IND 2664 5.5
 4. Eljanov, Pavel       g UKR 2701 5.0
 5. Kamsky, Gata         g USA 2718 5.0
 6. Sutovsky, Emil       g ISR 2656 4.5
 7. Miton, Kamil         g POL 2648 3.5
 8. Bluvshtein, Mark     g CAN 2520 3.5
 9. Charbonneau, Pascal  g CAN 2503 3.0
10. Short, Nigel D       g ENG 2683 2.0