In the 7th round tournament leader Vassily Ivanchuk suffered a surprising loss at the Grand Slam Masters Final against tail-ender Francisco Vallejo. Both Anand-Nakamura and Aronian-Carlsen ended in a draw, and so Ivanchuk is now still five points ahead of Anand, Aronian, Carlsen and Nakamura.

Round 7

At first sight the result '1-0' between Vallejo and Ivanchuk is a huge surprise: the Spaniard, who was declared 'too weak for this field' after a few rounds in Sao Paulo, winning against the legendary Ukrainian, who seems to be in such a good shape. However, in reality Vallejo is simply a very strong player too, and he just underperformed thus far. Also statistically speaking a win for him was likely to come, and we all know that we never know which Ivanchuk will be sitting behind the board.

On Friday it wasn't the super-Ivanchuk that we've seen before. In a position that's not too hard to draw he started playing inaccurately and eventually he lost a rook ending which might have been drawn as well.

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At the Bilbao opening ceremony some players said that especially this year they liked the football scoring system, because even with Ivanchuk having such a big lead, 'anything can happen'. On Friday the system was helping the leader who lost, since his 6-point lead only dropped to 5 points. This was because both Aronian-Carsen and Anand-Nakamura ended in a draw and these four players, all in second place, 'only' gained a point. For Ivanchuk, Vallejo was the best player to lose to in the second leg!

Nakamura didn't have any problems achieving the draw. He tweeted:

Thanks to Kramnik I was able to just play something silly like the Berlin and draw against the World Champion relatively effortlessly.

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The game between Aronian and Carlsen was not as spectacular as their first-round game in last month's Botvinnik Memorial, but not bad either:

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Grand Slam Masters Final 2011 | Schedule & results