Chess GM Vassily Ivanchuk robbed at gunpoint in Sao Paulo
October 05, 2011 09:36 IST
In a tragic end to the Sao Paulo leg of the 4th final Masters tournament, Grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine was robbed at gun point and lost his luggage and valuable belongings enroute to the airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
According to the reports, Ivanchuk, who leads the super-tournament ahead of World champion Viswanathan Anand and World No 1 Magnus Carlsen of Norway at the half-way stage, was around 20 meters outside his hotel boarding a taxi when the incident happened.
Speculations are rife that given the publicity the event has got in the past one week, this was not a random act.
The Ukrainian was accompanied by his wife, Oksana, at the time of the incident and among other things her passport was also stolen making her presence almost impossible in the Bilbao leg of the competition that starts on Thursday.
Both Ivanchuk and his wife boarded the flight to Munich in Germany from where his wife would now head home while Ivanchuk will move to Bilbao.
In yet unconfirmed reports, Ivanchuk has threatened to abandon the tournament if his wife is not present with him during the final leg at Bilbao. It remains to be seen whether Oksana will be able to make it to Bilbao in time.
As things stand, Ivanchuk leads the event with ten points in the soccer-like scoring system with five games still to be played at Bilbao. Hikaru Nakamura of United States holds the second spot on seven points while 2800 rating club members Anand, Carlsen and Levon Aronian of Armenia share the third spot on six points each.
Spaniard Francisco Vallejo Pons is last with three points in the double round-robin event.
In the sixth round on Thursday, Ivanchuk is slated to play Nakamura who tweeted that perhaps they could postpone their game to the rest day on 9th October.
Source: http://www.rediff.com
That’s bad news. I hope Chucky and his wife are both OK. That’s typical for Sao Paulo! It’s very common to be robbed at gunpoint there. Brazil in general has a very high crime rate.
It’s very good to make up such stories because chess will get much news in the papers.
Very bad..he should forget that as a bad dream and should focus all his potential for thr tournament..
In the name of all brazilian chess fans, I want to appologise Mr. Ivanchuk and his wife for this terrible situation. Hope they can overcome the trauma.
On the other hand, it is very important the press tells the whole world this kind of situation. Unfortunatelly brazilians pay very high duties to government and there is no security at all.
This is the reality in Brazil…corruption, thieves, bad public transportation, horrible airports, etc., etc. And this country will be the host of the Worldcup and Olympic Games. OMG!
haha…..
He;s ok so it’s not the end of the world…But I’ll bet he’ll be making jokes about it as soon as he settles down a bit.
Only Chucky that this funny thing could happen..haha…
(I know I know..its scary and all that..but still ..haha..its funny..
Anon9:41am, I know what you’re trying to say, and I’ve said something like it privately (to another blogger), but let’s say it more properly. Here in an Update to this ChessVibes item are words from the man himself, speaking from his character (boldface mine):
UPDATE: We were told by a journalist present in Sao Paulo that the organizers wanted to stress that Ivanchuk and his wife were not left to their own devices to find a taxi. The robbery actually took place in the hotel’s driveway, in a taxi the hotel scheduled for his departure. This actually suggests that the robbers had access to their departure information. In the meantime Ivanchuk has told Leontxo Garcia that he doesn’t want to postpone his game against Nakamura; he prefers Thursday, ‘without privileges’.
That’s terribly awful. If his computer has been stolen, hundred hours of top GM preparation, analysis and annotation are lost in case no recent backup has been done.
(And since this kind of preparation is valuable, I bet that this theft will be not the last if the robbers could resell such informations… even to the owner! So it’s important to never ever accept stolen work.)
Ivanchuk is fighting the battle on the board and off the board also in brazil!!!. Well he may have won on the board but lost off the board :). May be he should keep gun and use it on board also!!! That will make him win more but may end up in jail 🙂 But it is worth a try
Cortex, interesting and important point. In fact Ivanchuk confirmed that his laptop was not stolen—it was between his legs in a dark case, and he surmises the robbbers didn’t see it.