Always at the board

Seven points from eight games, champion with AX Gaia, 2742 Elo: things could hardly have gone better for Vasyl Ivanchuk on his first visit to Portugal. Although he is already 55, he says he would like to get back to 2700 Elo. He has now made up ten of his sixty missing Elo points. 

You can't prepare for Ivanchuk because he plays so many different openings, complains my team-mate Leonardo Costa. It's a familiar complaint. I have even seen Ivanchuk play the Alekhine Defence. 

After every game, he sits down with his opponent and analyses the game. Even if his opponent has 600 rating points less, even if it takes him two hours to analyse the game. And when his own analysis is finished, he sits down at another board. How much he must love chess.

Photo: Stefan Löffler

The first time I saw him play was in 1991. It was in the small Spanish town of Linares, hailed at the time as the "Wimbledon of chess". Ivanchuk won the tournament ahead of Kasparov, whom he beat in an impressive game. Ivanchuk was tipped as a possible world champion and was repeatedly ranked second in the world. He won two Chess Olympiads with the Soviet Union and two with Ukraine, and at the 2010 Olympiad he even won gold for the best performance on board one. However, he never played a match for the classical World Championship, although he did play in the final of the 2002 FIDE World Championship, where he lost to fellow countryman Ruslan Ponomariov.

Sometimes he gives lessons now. Ivanchuk told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that he enjoys explaining chess. But if you want to hire him as a coach, you have to organise it through friends. You won't find him online. Of course he also analyses with the computer, but he doesn't like it very much and is not as familiar with the engines as younger players.

He has only missed two Chess Olympiads since 1988, in 2016 and 2022, and will be taking part in Budapest for the sixteenth time. The team has been nominated by Alexander Beliavsky. The seventy-year-old is the new Ukrainian national coach. Of course, they have known each other for a long time, but they have never trained together. So this is something new. Volokitin, Ponomariov, Korobov and Kovalenko are his team-mates. An experienced team, but not one with a future. Could Beliavsky have picked Ihor Samunenkov? After all, the 15-year-old youngest Ukrainian grandmaster lives in Budapest. A talented kid, Ivanchuk thinks, but not an exceptional talent.

Why didn't he come to Portugal earlier? He always thought the country was very poor, Ivanchuk told his driver in a hotel near Soure on the way from the airport to the league. Dominic Cross from the Portuguese association wants to invite him to the Senior World Championships in November on the seaside island of Porto Santo. Ivanchuk listens to him and sounds interested. Then he remembers that the dates overlap with the European Championships in Montenegro. 

He has been to Spain dozens of times. Because of the war at home, and also because he can't work well on his chess in the nervous atmosphere, he now spends a lot of time with friends in Spain.

He plans to stay until his next tournament, possibly Abu Dhabi in mid-August. He already speaks good Spanish. The day after I read on X that Ivanchuk had met Spanish grandmaster Miguel Illescas and his Ukrainian wife Olga Alexandrova on his arrival at Madrid airport. 

Links

• Ivanchuk interview in El Mundo...
• World Senior Championship in Porto Santo...