Mtel Masters 2008

[Philippe]

From May 8 to May 18, the Mtel Masters tournament takes place at Sofia.

Veselin Topalov Bulgaria, ELO 2767
Levon Aronian Armenia, ELO 2763
Ivan Cheparinov Bulgaria, ELO 2695
Vassily Ivanchuk Ukraine, ELO 2740
Teimour Radjabov Azerbaijdan, ELO 2751
Bu Xiangzhi China, ELO 2708

Certainly a quite uninteresting event to be mentionned at chessusa.com as usual. But mentionned in rybka and chessmasterXI forums though these 2 ones are related to computers ...

[Jorge Garcia de Andres]

Hi Philippe,

Quite interesting tournament. Ivanchuck is doing quite well at the moment, he has won all the games he played.

[Mike S.]

quite well

He scored 5.0/5 against an Elo average of 2737 (even having black three times). This is sensational.

Do we have to go back to Fischer's famous candidate matches, or did anyone else have such a winning streak against comparable top opposition, since then?

[Martin Thoresen]

Kasparov had a winning streak of 7 victories in 1999

Topalov had a streak of 5 (or was it 6) in San Luis in 2005

[M ANSARI]

I think that has to rate as one of the highest performances ever. Ivanchuk has always been the player that can beat anyone. I remember being impressed some time back when he outplayed Kasparov with the black pieces. His only problem was that he was not totally stable ... and could lose on time sometimes in simple positions. The games in this tourney are pretty violent ... lot of blood and gore. It will be interesting to see how Ivanchuk does in the remainder of the games ... he usually has a tendency to collapse ... but so far he seems very mature and hopefully he will perform to what his true potential is.