Vassily Ivanchuk exploded onto the chess scene in 1988 at 19 by scoring a scintillating 7.5/9 at the New York Open, besting a field of strong grandmasters, including Vladimir Tukmakov, Bozidar Ivanovic, and Boris Gulko! By the end of the year, his rating had skyrocketed into the world's top 10, and he soon achieved international fame by winning the 1991 Linares Super Tournament ahead of a score of the world's best players, beating World Champion Garry Kasparov and perennial challenger and ex-champion Anatoly Karpov in the process. By the onset of the World Championship candidates cycle that year, it was widely anticipated that Ivanchuk was a future world champion in the making.
Alas, Ivanchuk's mercurial temperament was soon to surface. It seems that he is something of a savant. While he has enormous intuitive chess talent, his emotional equilibrium is unpredictable, subject to mercurial twists and turns that affect his playing objectivity and judgement. As he describes it, playing under the weight of expectations,
"Sometimes... gives me an extra incentive to put in more work, but at other times... success goes to your head. Then you don't always objectively accept defeats, but instead think, 'How's that possible? How could I make such bad moves?" and I'm not always able to recover quickly."
Elaborating on the subject of nerves, he relates:
"I know myself--if a tournament is very important, then that's it, I can't prepare for it--neither at the computer nor at the chessboard. When the tension drops a little then the desire to play chess returns... Why is it like that? I don't know."
Moreover:
"It's not only about the games themselves, but also the time between games. For me the big problem is the latter--waiting, getting butterflies in your stomach..."
This problem of nerves has plagued Ivanchuk throughout his career, such that it is never surprising to see him at the top of a tournament cross table or the bottom, depending on how his emotional equilibrium is withstanding the stress.
At Reggio Emilia in April of this year (2012), Ivanchuk gave a lamentably vivid demonstration of the agony he endures when his nerves fail. As the top rated player in a 6-person double round robin, Ivanchuk seemed to start out with confidence, scoring two wins and two draws in the first four rounds. In the fifth round, playing with the black pieces against American GM Hikaru Nakamura, Ivanchuk put together a masterful positional game, goading his opponent forward and then counterattacking ferociously to achieve a winning position, and then... he blundered, first losing his advantage, and then letting the game crumble into a loss. In the 6th round, playing with black again, this time against the lowest rated player in the event, Ivanchuk played passively, almost indifferently, and slowly lost a game that he seemed never to be fully present in. In the 7th round, he played more actively, but at a critical point he suffered a complete mental lapse and dropped a piece:
Vitiugov-Ivanchuk
Black to move, Ivanchuk played 30. ... Nxc4?? 31. Nxc4 and only now realized that the planned 31. ... b5 and Qb6, to recapture on c4 with the rook does not work because of 32. Ne3, blocking the check.
Alas, the story did not end there.
In round 8, Ivanchuk showed up a mere shadow of himself and seemed to invite all hell to rain on his head:
Ivanchuk-Caruana
Such positions do not arise of themselves! From here, Ivanchuk's position just steadily eroded:
21. ... e4
22. fxe4 dxe4
23. Be2 f4
24. axb6 Qxb6
25. Qb3 Qa7
And now, trying to be active, Ivanchuk played the losing:
26. Bb5?
26. ... cxd4
27. Bxd7 dxe3
28. Nc4 Rd8
29. Ba4 Rd2
And now, obviously beside himself, Ivanchuk suffered a complete and almost unprecedented meltdown:
30. Qxb7 Qxb7
31. Rxf4 gxf4
32. Nxd2 exd2
33. Bxf4 Rxf4
34. Bc6 Qb6+
0-1
One could cry watching such a thing.
Amazingly, having vented at the universe, Ivanchuk came back to calmly draw in the 9th round and then won in the tenth! At was as if, having lost everything, he could finally set his nerves aside and return to playing chess.
In terms of pure personality, Ivanchuk seems as temperamental and eccentric on the board or off. As World Champion Anand described him:
"He's someone who is very intelligent... but you never know which mood he is going to be in. Some days he will treat you like his long-lost brother. The next day he ignores you completely. ... I have seen him totally drunk and singing Ukrainian poetry and then the next day I have seen him give an impressive talk."
Ivanchuk tends not to look at the board when playing, but instead, stares blankly around the room, as he reviews variations solely in his mind.
He plays chess prolifically, seemingly to avoid having many periods of "waiting" where his nerves can play on him, and he is one of the most active grandmasters in the world. He also plays regularly with amateurs; as he puts it:
"If someone asks me to play a game then it's not hard for me to give them that pleasure."
Non-chess hobbies that he pursues tend to be rather fanatical. For a time, he played endless games of Internet checkers:
"I would ... go onto the site and play checkers for hours on end, until you no longer get up from your desk, and have square eyes. ... it takes me a huge amount of effort to stop."
Unfortunately, he also finds chess somewhat antisocial, relating that:
"In general, I feel as though I don't have enough contact with people... In chess there's constant competition and it's important not to reveal your weaknesses, which has hurt me a little in life as I don't talk enough with people... there has to be a certain distance between competitors."
Elaborating on this, he opines:
"I'd say that for a top-level chess player, sincerity and openness are negative qualities."
Of course, Ivanchuk is also famous for his eccentric, seemingly autistic moments, such as when he was awarded an oversized, ceremonial winner's check for finishing first at the 1994 Intel Grand Prix, and, left holding it on the stage, he looked at it bemusedly for a moment and then proceeded to attempt to fold it down to pocket size and put it into his wallet. The tournament organizers had to intervene!
On another occasion, he was been observed out in a park near his hotel around midnight, dressed in shorts despite freezing temperatures and howling like a wolf, perhaps attempting to exorcise the agony of his loss the day before...
In this same spirit, I'd like to wrap this up with another priceless Ivanchuk quote. Whens asked whether chess playing came naturally to him, he replied:
"It's like a centipede. If it thought about how to place its feet it would be difficult for it to move, but instead it just moves, and everything works out well for it."
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