World Chess Olympiad/ World Team Chess

[sameerph]

Chess olympiad is taking place in Batumi,Georgia and this time we have one of the strongest team in last few years in open section with Anand playing olympiad after 12 years.

In open section, our team started with a 3.5-0.5 win over El Salvadore and 3.5-0.5 win over Austria.

On womens section, we started with a perfect 8 out of 8 wins in 2 rounds.

There is a long way to go but there are medal hopes from both teams.

[Sin Hombre]

Anand has started very well and the men with a 3.5-0.5 win against a decent Canadian team.

However, the stupid pairing system employed means we play the US already in round 4 in a match up between 2 medal contenders (#5 vs #1 seed).

In some other matchups between 100% teams, we have #15 vs #23, #10 vs #32 and #3 China against #18 Croatia.

[sameerph]

I think in swiss league, these type of match-ups occur and it is not necessarily bad for us to be playing a top team towards the start. I would be preferable for us to play weaker teams towards the end.

There will be some very good match-ups in that tie vs USA-

Caruana vs Anand
Wesley So vs Hari
Nakamura vs Vidit
Shankland vs Adhiban/ Sasikiran

I guess USA will be favorite as their #4 appears much stronger than ours.

[sameerph]

Anand lost to Karuna and other matches were drawn. So, we lose 1.5-2.5 to USA.
We are now down to 14th place after 4 rounds. We play Paraguay today. Hope it is a clean sweep there.

Our women had a 2-2 draw against Serbia in the third round but won 3-1 against Poland in 4th round.
We are ranked 7th after round 4 and play Argentina today.

[kujo]

Anand has started very well and the men with a 3.5-0.5 win against a decent Canadian team.

However, the stupid pairing system employed means we play the US already in round 4 in a match up between 2 medal contenders (#5 vs #1 seed).

In some other matchups between 100% teams, we have #15 vs #23, #10 vs #32 and #3 China against #18 Croatia.

The swiss round robin is a good system and the only viable system for such a large group of competitors, where seedings are not very reliable - with time limit on the tournament length (and hence the number of total matches that can be played)

Competitors meet one-to-one in each round and are paired using a set of rules designed to ensure that each competitor plays opponents with a similar running score, but not the same opponent more than once. The winner is the competitor with the highest aggregate points earned in all rounds.

Most importantly, the first move (white) advantage in Chess would mean you have to play twice against the same competitor, to do a fair evaluation of a single matchup.... So, this system is the best one to use for such tournaments.

[prasen9]

I agree fully. This is the best system we have. The system now got evidence that the US is stronger than India. India falls down a bit but if they are better than #14, we will climb back and we will get some easier matches now. If you have sufficient rounds, the final rankings should be pretty accurate or at least the best possible (given the known systems; someone may come up with some brilliant system that is better) given the number of rounds.

In some cases though, it is not much better than random pairings. If you want to know (some of) the details, here is a paper: The Swiss System

[sameerph]

3.5-0.5 wins both teams in round 5. Women are in 7th place and men in 9th after round 5.

[Sin Hombre]

And the men now get #2 seeds Russia.

As far as pairings go, it is obviously not the best system for a team event. An average rating difference of 100 elo points is much harder to turn around than for an individual pair.

http://chess-results.com/tnr368908.aspx ... ilen=99999

Olympiad-Sonneborn-Berger-Tie-Break without lowest result which is used as TB2 would have been a much better way to pair teams. It makes little sense that Ukraine and Germany are ahead of us without any good results.

[prasen9]

Yes, the intermediate scores will have inconsistent rankings to the final score. The final score will only be meaningful if there are sufficient number of rounds. Ukraine is getting Poland and Germany is getting Israel. #10 and #11. Let's see how it goes. USA, Russia, India have all taken a hit. I expect them to claw back up.

[sameerph]

We had a creditable 2-2 draw against Russia who had better rated players on all 4 boards. Now, we are 14th place with 4 wins, 1 draw and 1 loss in 6 rounds. The only teams with 6 out of 6 wins so far are Azerbeijan and Poland and they play each other in 7th round. We face 15th seeded Egypt in 7th round and should win .

A bit of a disappointment in women where with wins from Hampi and Sachedev, we had a chance to beat table toppers USA bur our other 2 girls lost. Now, we are in 5th place there with 4 wins and 2 draws. There is no team with perfect record there and so it is all close at the top. We play second placed Georgia which will be an important tie.

[sameerph]

Yesterday, Vidit had a shocking loss against much lower rated player from Egypt and Anand too drew his match but thankfully Hari and Sasi won their matches to get a 2.5-1.5 win for us. With that win, we move right upto 5th spot now in the rankings after 7th round. We are up against Czech Republic today in 8th round.

In women, we had another 2-2 draw against Georgia. We are in 7th place with 4 wins and 3 draws. Up against Hungary in 8th round today.

[prasen9]

That's a good pairing for us. We have to take advantage and win this one. There are only 11 rounds in total.

[sameerph]

In men, we have 2.5-1.5 win against Czech Republic in 8th round. We rested our most successful player Hari for this tie but Sasikaran got a win on 4th board and others 3 were draws. Now, we are closing in up to 4th place. In terms of match points, USA is the only team with 7 wins out of 8 wins and 16 match points while there are 7 teams (India, France, Azerbaijan, Armenia, China, Germany & England) are on 13 points! It is all close together with only 3 rounds to go. Up against Armenia today.

Women are going down now. They had their first loss 1-3 against Hungary. So, now they are down to 14th place in standings. We play Italy today.

[prasen9]

Well, that is a good pairing. Armenia is #8. Maybe next round we will get Azerbaijan or something like that!

[sameerph]

Disappointing day yesterday for us as men lose 1.5-2.5 against Armenia and women draw 2-2 against lower ranked Italy.

Looks like that may pretty much seal our medal hopes on both categories. We are down to 11th place in men and 14th place in women. Men play Netherlands today while women play Peru.