Ivanchuk legitimately outplayed Carlsen in their game. But the Kramnik game I wouldn't put much stock in, having your opponent playing for a must-win as BLACK is a dream scenario.

That said, yes, he's a guy whose peak strength is astronomical, on any given day he's capable of beating any player. He's also prone to massive downswings as well.

Chucky has been playing Candidates matches for over 21 years and is still ranked #13 in the world - and that's before his wins over Carlsen and Kramnik. I think you are exaggerating his downswings juuuust a tad.

If you meant 'he can play a bad tourney,' yeah so can all GMs, look at Naka and Anand lately. Or basically anyone ever. In the Olympiad hes +50 =77 -6 which is pretty amazing. He also got screwed by the FIDE/PCA split like some other top guys did in the 1990s.

His weakness is the same as Hubner or Rubinstein or Torre, or any other famous grandmaster who struggled with his nerves. He had a bad run in 3 mos in 2009, but otherwise since 1991 he's been pretty steady results-wise. Playing a few games poorly in Bilbao after getting mugged is not abnormal.

Ivanchuk went to 2780 to under 2700 and back to mid-2700s pretty rapidly, but yeah, other than that period his results have been reasonably steady.

(Edited to add: http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=14100010, check out 2007-2010 here. Not that other players don't have rating swings, but they tend to come in wider arcs...)

how angry are people going to get when vishy retains the title?

If he does that then he is the greatest champion of all time.

Not sure I'd go that far, but it would be an impressive run of match results.

Here's a pretty interesting post-candidates interview with Kramnik: http://pogonina.com/index.php?option...&&lang=english