Standings after 9 rounds:
| 1. | Alekseev, Evgeny | g | RUS | 2716 | 5½ | |||||||||||||||
| 2. | Aronian, Levon | g | ARM | 2754 | 5½ | |||||||||||||||
| 3. | Leko, Peter | g | HUN | 2751 | 5 | |||||||||||||||
| 4. | Svidler, Peter | g | RUS | 2726 | 5 | |||||||||||||||
| 5. | Bacrot, Etienne | g | FRA | 2728 | 5 | |||||||||||||||
| 6. | Karjakin, Sergey | g | UKR | 2721 | 4½ | |||||||||||||||
| 7. | Grischuk, Alexander | g | RUS | 2748 | 4½ | |||||||||||||||
| 8. | Akopian, Vladimir | g | ARM | 2696 | 4½ | |||||||||||||||
| 9. | Eljanov, Pavel | g | UKR | 2693 | 4½ | |||||||||||||||
| 10. | Kamsky, Gata | g | USA | 2720 | 4 | |||||||||||||||
| 11. | Gelfand, Boris | g | ISR | 2733 | 4 | |||||||||||||||
| 12. | Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar | g | AZE | 2725 | 4 | |||||||||||||||
| 13. | Kasimdzhanov, Rustam | g | UZB | 2695 | 4 | |||||||||||||||
| 14. | Ivanchuk, Vassily | g | UKR | 2746 | 3 |
Official website: http://www.nalchik2009.fide.com
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
This kid Alekseev is special. He’ll be 2800 by next year.
Ivanchuk is a loser …
Ivanchuk should be relaxed because he obviously isn’t letting his performance in this tourney bother him at all.
Ivanchuk is the world’s best player when he is in the right mode, like when he beat the other top super gms 5-0 not long ago. When he isn’t in his right mode, he can play so badly. He’s very excentric and totally unpredictable. He has also invented a new chess:
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5320
Probably, I think is that he does not know how to pace himself, playing too much competitive chess throughout the year. It would benefit him to be more like Kasparov and limit the number of tournaments he plays in each year. I think the problem is that Ivanchuk likes to play tournaments too much for his own good. The result is that the quality of his play drops when he is out of new ideas, this more than anything probably accounts for his erratic results.