World Chess Olympiad/ World Team Chess

[prasen9]

If Carlsen and Kramnik are playing, why not Anand?

He fails miserably (not really, but under performs) every time he tries, at least after he became a top player...

But that does not matter. His playing moves the others down one board and they can eke out more victories. I think he knows that. He just does not want to play.

[sameerph]

Yes and it seems he too much of a star for anyone to criticise his non participation.

Btw, we maintained our obsession with 4th place from Rio to here. Our mens team came 4th, Hari stood 4th on mens top board, Vidit stood 4th on mens third board and Tania stood 4th on womens top board.

[Prashant]

His playing moves the others down one board and they can eke out more victories.

Exactly. India did significantly worse than the other top teams on board 4. Being able to move Adhiban & Vidit down a board each would have been huge.

Going a step further - Anand is only slightly ahead of Harikrishna in rankings/ELO. They could have kept Hari on board 1 & played Anand on board 2. Plenty of other teams had senior (as in somewhat older) GMs playing lower boards.

[Prashant]

Incidentally - I just looked at the current ELO rankings, and it appears that the 5th-7th ranked Indians also skipped, or weren't selected. Those would be Suryashekar Ganguly, Negi & Sasikiran.

[prashanthm]

Incidentally - I just looked at the current ELO rankings, and it appears that the 5th-7th ranked Indians also skipped, or weren't selected. Those would be Suryashekar Ganguly, Negi & Sasikiran.

Negi has taken a sabbatical (I'm hopeful that he'll come back) from chess to do his masters at Stanford...
Just before that he helped India to the bronze medal at the 2014 Tromso Olympiad manning the top board...

Sethu did tremendously well on the 2nd board allowing Sasikiran to play more freely on the 3rd board...

Just a bad tournament for Sethu this time around and with the lack of a high quality 5th player (no disrespect to the young Murali K), he didn't get a break and had to play all the 11 games...

https://www.olimpbase.org/2014/2014ind.html

[Prashant]

Of course, you're right I had forgotten about Negi. Oh well - 4th is still a very creditable performance, and achieved without Anand to boot...

[prasen9]

Yes, why on earth did Sethu play as the 4th player? He was the weak link and did poorly. I would have had Ganguly. Or even Sasi. Were they not available?

[prashanthm]

Yes, why on earth did Sethu play as the 4th player? He was the weak link and did poorly. I would have had Ganguly. Or even Sasi. Were they not available?

Sethu just had a bad tournament... and lack of a quality 5th player also had an effect in terms of sharing the load...
Refer to my previous post about the 2014 olympiad and Sethu's performance on the 2nd board...

[prasen9]

Yes, but, if you go by the ELO ratings, he is not in the first 8. The ELO ratings are a reasonable ranking system. It was known that Sethu would be the weaklink. And, he was. Was Ganguly not available? Or Sasikiran? Was Sethu in very good form? Is it for the future? It is sort of a weird selection.

[jaydeep]

In 2016 Sethu won the Asian Chess Championship in Tashkent ... He is also having few good results in other international tournaments, importantly third place in Gibraltar Tournament behind Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Hikaru Nakamura, then 4th place finished in 11th Edmonton International Tournament and Hasselbacken Open Tournament.
So considering this he was in decent form in 2016.

[Prashant]

There is a notion in chess culture that there are guys who are better at larger tournaments vs better at match-play/small tournaments. The difference is in the latter case you can prepare extensively for the specific tendencies of the opponent(s). Whereas at the Olympiad, there are just too many potential opponents in quick succession for this to be possible, and you need to do well without the preparation (or with much less of it).

I wonder if, given his strong showing at the last Olympiad, they considered Sethu to be more of a tournament player than the guys with better ELO ratings. This is the only reasonable explanation I can come up with. Unless of course those guys were offered a spot & chose to refuse.

[prasen9]

Thanks for the answers guys. Makes a bit of sense to me now.

[sameerph]

Btw, I remember Sasi was quite good few year back and he was # 2 behind Anand and ahead of Hari. Has he regressed this much to be now ranked below top 5=6 in India ?

[kujo]

top players not playing in Olympiad is not a new issue. There are many different reasons, including the one Prashant wrote above. Here is an old article on some other factors.

http://www.business-standard.com/articl ... 100_1.html

[kujo]

And here is a more recent article on the same issue. You would notice how some of these points are repeated, almost verbatim, two years later!

http://indianewengland.com/2016/08/hari ... -olympiad/