World Chess Olympiad/ World Team Chess

[sameerph]

It seems like we won the bronze. That is a great achievement for a team without Anand and Hari.

[prashanthm]

Wow!!! I'm so glad that I was wrong about the Russia result.

India get the bronze for the very first time, and qualifies for the world team championship....

China takes the gold. Both India and China were missing their top two players. Excellent achievement...

Sasi gets the individual silver on the 3rd board....
Awesome stuff by young guns Negi and Sethu on the top two boards with a performance rating of 2700+ each....

On the women's side, india finish 10th...
Padmini was not fielded to play the final round, apparently in a bid to secure her individual gold medal, not good...
But kudos to Padmini for getting the gold.....

[prashanthm]

In fact indian men lost the silver by a mere 0.5 on the tie break to Hungary....

[suresh]

Congratulations to the Indian Men's team. They also had luck on their side but they made every opportunity count. They got to play Uzbekistan in the last round and only one top 10 team in the round robin league. Sad to see the Indian women rest Padmini Rout for the last round -- putting individual glory before team is Indian I guess (Sachin got an hundred compensates an Indian loss).

[Prashant]

Resting a player to ensure a board medal is a long tradition used by every country in these tournaments. It has been happening as long as I've been paying attention. I think if the team were in contention for a medal it would have been different.

[Saniapower]

Congratulations to the Men's team. Indian women have also done quite well.

[sameerph]

This is a good article on our win-

Solid play, strategic planning key to India's success at Chess Olympiad

I was wondering how Sasi has gone to the third board and it looks like it was a streategy.

As per this strategy, Sasikiran with an elo rating of 2,669 points played on the third board. Grandmaster Parimarjan Negi (2,645) played first board, Sethuraman (2,590) on the second and GM B Adhiban (2,619) on the fourth board. The fifth player GM Lalith Babu MR (2,565) was the reserve player though technically he was called fifth board player.

The idea was to secure a win at the lower boards with top rated players while the lower rated team members will try to hold/draw their games at the top boards against stronger opponents.

At the Asian Nations Cup, the Indian team decided break away from the tradition and adopted the alternate strategy of playing Sasikiran and Negi on the second and fourth boards.

"Yeah, the board order we adopted was just great. Hats off to our captain GM RB Ramesh for taking this key decision," Sethuraman said.

A bit surprised that this is allowed. Normally, in most of the team events in other sports, a top ranked player has to play at no. 1 position and so on.

[gbelday]

Yeah Sameer. Same thought. How is this allowed?

[prashanthm]

The order of the board players is decided by the captain based on his perspective of each players strengths and not just by the ELO or the world rank.

But this was done more to get a higher chance of a win in the match scenario and with the confidence on Pari and Sethu to man up the top two boards, which they did fantastically well. Sethu finished 7.5/10 with no losses and Pari 6.5/10 with one loss to Caruana. Those are some laudable performances.

Even Adhiban was playing lower board than his rating would have allowed him to play and the captain has invested his confidence in the lower rated Sethu for the 2nd board, which gave Adhiban a chance to try for more wins on the 4th board against relatively weaker players...

Hell, even we followed the same strategy 10 years ago, when we were playing the all india inter university. The top player in my team was playing the 3rd board and me, the 2nd best player was playing the 4th board, hoping that the other two players would get away with draws on the 'clinton starofindia.com two boards.

It's a tactic that gets used a lot...

Even Russia fielded highly rated Karjakin on the 4th board, despite being treated higher than Kramnik and Svidler...

[gbelday]

Thanks prashanth. Good to know that you played for your univ. It's good to see we have folks besides Anand, Hari and Sasi doing well.

[prashanthm]

2015 World Team Chess, Armenia/Womens, China

Indian teams playing the World Team Chess in the Open category and the Women's Category being held in Armenia and China respectively...

Hari, Sasi, Sethu, Vidit & Deep are in the Men's team...

Our team is 4th with two wins, a draw and a loss. They won against Hungary today when our young gun Vidit took out Hungarian youngster Rapport...

Humpy, Harika, Padmini, Soumya and Mary Ann are in the Women's team...

Our team is languishing at 9th place after 4 rounds with two ties and two close losses.... Today was a great chance to beat the Russians, Humpy lost the plot from a winning position and lost for us to lose the match...

[prashanthm]

@Mods, can we rename this thread to 'World Chess Olympiad/World Team Chess' so that we can discuss team events here rather than creating a new thread everytime...

[jaydeep]

@Mods, can we rename this thread to 'World Chess Olympiad/World Team Chess' so that we can discuss team events here rather than creating a new thread everytime...

Good suggestion.
Before this our men lost horribly against Israel in third round tie.

[sameerph]

Our mens team drew their fifth round and are in sixth position with 11 points after 6 rounds in Armenia.

Our womens team had a good 3-1 win over USA in fifth round and 4-0 win over weak Egypt in sixth round and we have now jumped up to 5th place after 6 rounds.

[prashanthm]

Indian Men finish an abysmal 9th after losses to Russia, Armenia and China in the last 4 rounds...

Only Hari and Vidit had respectable performances...
Vidit was in line for a board prize until he misplayed a drawn game against the Armenian player...

http://www.chess-results.com/tnr170346. ... =30&wi=984

Indian Women finish 4th...

Humpy and Harika finish in Top-3 on their respective boards... Both of them could have done better... Harika missed a clear win in the penultimate round and lost, while Humpy missed a couple of wins as well....

http://chess-results.com/tnr170190.aspx ... =74&wi=821