World Chess Olympiad/ World Team Chess

[prasen9]

We should be favorites against the Dutch too but let's see.

[prasen9]

Anand is not playing. So Giri is a favorite over Hari. The rest of the three, we are favorites. Hope we can pull through a win against the Netherlands.

[sameerph]

Hari got a draw against Giri but we got wins on #3 and #4 boards by Adhiban and Sasi for us to get 3-1 win.

Standings not updated yet but we may have an outside chance of a medal if we get a win last round.

[arjun2761]

Our men are now in 6th place after the impressive win against Netherlands.

They play 4th place Poland while the top 5 teams play each other. A victory for India will leap frog Poland and will put us anywhere from 2-4th based on how the other results play out.

Good luck for a win against Poland against whom we should be favored on most boards although the Poles have been playing above their rankings in this tournament.

[sameerph]

Yes, we are surely in with a good chance if we win against Poland. This is the analysis from Chessbase India -

How can team India win a medal at the Batumi Olympiad 2018?

So, we have to hope that USA-China ends in a win for either team taking that team to clear gold. Then, If Russia-France ends in a draw we can get a silver with a win over Poland. It can be bronze if only one these 2 scenarios happen.

The key is of course get a win over Poland and hope other results fall in place for us.

Btw, both Anand and Hari are in line for board medals too. Anand currently in 4th place for board 1 and Hari in 3rd place on board 2.

[sameerph]

No luck for us today as we could only draw 2-2 against Poland. So, no medal for us .

Men finished 6th.
Women finished 8th.

In individual board medals-

TaniaSachdev - 4th (for the 2nd olympiad in a row)
Anand, Hari and Harika - 5th
Adhiban and Sasi - 6th

Finishing 6th and 8th in a field of around 150 nations is quite good. But, does not feel good when China gets golds in both men and women.

[prasen9]

The men slightly underperformed their seeding. The match against Armenia was crucial The two draws were understandable. And the loss to the U.S. But, Armenia

[sameerph]

Yes, a win against Armenia would have taken us to same number of points as medalists China, USA and Russia and our tie break was very good. Of course, a win against Armenia would have probably meant tougher matches in the last 2 rounds. We could have met gold medalists China whom we never met eventually.

[rajitghosh]

There was an online Chess Olympiad going on. India is joint winner with Russia. Not sure if lot of people followed this.

[sameerph]

This in an excellent achievement by our team although have not folllowed in detail if all the teams were at full strength.

[Kumar]

Great performance! We did get lucky with Indian team players not able to complete two matches in finals due to internet outage ! They were initially declared as losses for India! And FIDE deciding to declare both teams joint winners! Coincidentally during earlier round, India’s opponent also lost internet connectivity! That game was awarded to India and their opponent withdrew

[Varma]

Good to see you back in the forum, Kumar. It's been a very long time. I hope you are doing well. I logged back in today after a 4+ month hiatus, by far my longest time away from the forum in almost 20 years

- Varma

[Kumar]

Good to see you back in the forum, Kumar. It's been a very long time. I hope you are doing well. I logged back in today after a 4+ month hiatus, by far my longest time away from the forum in almost 20 years

- Varma

Thanks Varma!Everything going well! Since I use private browsing I am not logged on all the time and end up forgetting my password!Still lurking but not much as earlier

[Sin Hombre]

This in an excellent achievement by our team although have not folllowed in detail if all the teams were at full strength.

I followed this in detail so let me add some colour here. Hopefully someone is going to read this very long summary

This is an online olympiad and the rules are quite different. 6 boards with 2 men, 2 women, 1 boy and 1 girl. This clearly helps us since we have a lot of depth, and already limited the number of potential winners (it was almost certain the winner would come from Russia, China or India).

Almost every major country was at full strength, except the US. The US (after buying chess players) is the clear favourite these days for the men's olympiad.

We had internet issues against Mongolia in the group stage where Humpy and Nihal got disconnected and lost, and we drew 3-3. We needed a win against China in the last round of the group stages to win our group, which we very impressively did (our first win against china in an olympiad in a long time) and this was a full-strength Chinese team.

This meant a direct entry in the last 8 and into the easier half of the draw.

We had Armenia in the last 8; and the first of 2 ties was 2.5-2.5 with Nihal having a slight advantage in the endgame and the Armenian player disconnected. The Armenians claimed it was a chess.com outage but there was no such evidence. Instead of playing the second leg, the Armenians forfeited.

We had Poland in the last 4. We lost the first leg 4-2 but went on the win the second leg 4.5-1.5; to force an armageddon which Humpy won. Also highlighted the futility of Armenia giving up in the QFs after the first leg.

Now, to the finals, we drew 3-3 with Russia in the first leg.

And in the second leg, we drew on the 2 men's boards and the #2 women's board, which were the boards where Russia had a ranking advantage. 1.5-1.5

Now, Humpy, Nihal and Divya all disconnected because of a global cloudflare outage. Very clearly provable that they weren't to blame.

Humpy managed to reconnect but had lost a lot of time, and lose from a slightly worse position with much less time.

Divya was clearly winning in her game, and Nihal had a draw-ish game but Nihal was the superior player under time pressure, and if anyone, he would be the one with chances in his game.

Fide went to the Russian captain and asked if they wanted to play an armageddon or be joint winner, they chose the latter.

Russian players in particular Nepo and Kosteniuk were extremely bitter about this and claimed that India were given the joint title to appease the fans, and how they didn't win a single game (without noticing they themselves didn't win a single game either since Humpy's game was officially a no-result).

Anyways, very good achievement by the Indian team and a lot of people followed this (70k watched the final live on YouTube!)


Indian player performances
men
Vidit - solid, played to his elo
Hari - very good, swindled a lot of bad endgames into favorable results
Anand - very bad

women
Humpy - good
Harika - solid

boys
Nihal and Praggna - very good

girls
Divya - very good. She is fun to watch.
Vantika - solid

[jaydeep]

Hey Sin Hombre, thanks for this detail summary ... So deserving gold medal for us with newly introduced rule of including juniors in the Chess Olympiad.