Tuesday
Mar102015
Ivanchuk Wins the Vladimir Petrov Memorial
Tuesday, March 10, 2015 at 11:50PM
Vassily (now "Vasil") Ivanchuk won the Vladimir Petrov Memorial in Jurmala, Latvia this past weekend, scoring 9/11 in this open Swiss. This was an extremely strong rapid tournament, and Ivanchuk's score put him half a point ahead of Sergey Karjakin, Boris Gelfand and Richard Rapport. There was also a strong (but significantly weaker) field in the blitz tournament held on Friday; that finished in a four-way tie between Vladimir Malakhov (who won on tiebreaks), Daniel Fridman, Valentina Gunina and Loek van Wely.
A helpful page for English-speakers and readers is here.
HT: Thomas Richter
tagged Vassily Ivanchuk
Reader Comments (1)
It might simply be a patriotic gesture, I imagine. He used to be referred to as Vassily which is a direct transliteration of the Russian form of his name, Василий. It is usually the case that in English we use transliteration of Russian equivalents of first names from the former USSR even if, in fact, the original (be it Ukrainian, Belorussian, or any other) would normally be transliterated differently.
Ivanchuk's first name in his native Ukrainian isn't Василий, but Василь. Now that virtually all sources refer to him as Vasil I am inclined to think that he must have expressed such request in view of Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.