Chennai Olympiad

corkcitychess

Conor should have played tomorrow instead of today...the GM norm was assured

statistically unlikely he will ever win an olympic gold medal again but anyway congrads on the great performance and GM norm

checknraise

If Conor was going to play 1 more game why does it matter if it was round 10 or 11? He was still going to play and put his board prize on the line. Would have thought it might make sense to play tomorrow if it was possible to get an 11 round norm.

cdeb

Teams are published already - Conor and Eibhia sitting out.

RooksPawn

I am somewhat surprised Alice is playing round 11. She does have White but needs to win.

I guess they wanted to maximise the result and get a higher placing.

Yes, I agree that we should send strong teams to every event for which we are eligible. Ireland has tended not to enter the European Teams and when we did last year it was basically a junior team, a few players who were interested in going, plus Stephen Jessel.

It's only every second year; the next one is in Budva. Montenegro, November 2023.

While looking at the ECU calendar, I noticed that the European Women's Individual Championship is in Prague starting on 19 August. I guess Trisha will play in that and maybe one or two of the others.

Looking at the pairings for the top matches tomorrow, I see that the top four matches are all relevant to the podium places.

Match 1 because of the TV is Germany (15 MP) v India-2 (16 MP); Gukesh's disaster today is probably going to cost them gold.

Match 2 is Armenia (17) v Spain (15) with Spain higher rated on all boards but in this tournament that has not meant much.

Match 3 is Uzbekistan (17) v Netherlands (15) with the Uzbeks only higher rated on board 3.

Match 4 is India-1 (16) v USA (16). India's boards 2-3-4 are unbeaten but Harikrishna has lost two of his last three games, one of them a marathon heartbreaker, and I tend to think Caruana, despite being Black, will find a way to beat him. Fabiano, after a terrible start and then refusing a repetition against Gukesh, has won his last two games. Wesley So has been doing very well too but I sense the Americans are vulnerable on the bottom two boards.

All three results are possible in each of those matches and then the dreaded tiebreaks will decide.

England are in match 5 against Moldova which doesn't matter. David Howell is yet again not playing to secure his gold medal.

I note that the USA are not trusting Aronian for the big match against India-1 and have given White to Wesley So (against Vidit) and Sam Shankland (against Narayanan).

Abdusattarov will play Anish Giri in the big Uzbekistan-Netherlands match, where Yakkuboev will have Black against Jorden van Foreest. I would back Jorden to win that which could impact Conor's chances of a bronze medal. Melkumyan and Sarin have tough opponents too but the Greek guy Theodorou is not playing the last round. His Rp is only 3 behind Yakkuboev at present and 27 ahead of Sarin (who has White against Bluebaum and will probably win).

Conor is only a few points behind Melkumyan who could lose to Paco Vallejo Pons so Conor still has a chance of a medal.

Magnus isn't playing the last round. Today he was held to a draw by Shitco of Moldova who has got a GM norm, and Norway lost the match.

In the women's olympiad India lead by 1 MP but again Harika will not play, so a win against the USA is not certain. Apparently she is heavily pregnant.

eclipsechaser

I can't speak for Alice but my guess is she cares more about the team result than the women's title. Commendable attitude if so.

Joedryan

I see we dont have many early risers :)

cdeb

You're cheating being an hour ahead!

First nation result is a draw on 1 in India v USA

RooksPawn

After two and three quarter hours (approx): Trisha and Lara under pressure, Alice attacking and probably close to a win, Diana a pawn up.

(EDIT: Alice missed 26 f6 and later 29 Rg6; two winning shots spurned and her advantage is gone, but all results possible.)

In the top women's matches, board 2 drawn in both the India-USA and Ukraine-Poland matches.

On current positions, Ukraine and USA will win. That means the Azerbaijan-Georgia match is also relevant for the top medals. Too close to call.

OPEN Olympiad. Mark has drawn. Alex under pressure, compensated by Tarun doing well. Tom sacrificed the exchange in the opening and is attacking but it looks pretty unclear, so he may have to settle for a draw if he can get it.

In the top matches, I was wrong about Caruana trying to win. He forced a repetition after only 18 moves, using hardly any time. USA are better in their games with White.

Gawain Jones has also drawn but all other games in the top matches are running.

Sarin is better against Bluebaum in the Germany-India2 match. Sargissian is beating SHirov so Armenia are likely to beat Spain. The match between India1 and Netherlands cannot be called yet.

RooksPawn

How things change in under an hour.

Women's match: Diana has won, Lara and Alice are now winning but Trisha remains in trouble (but fighting). We cannot rule out further twists.

Open match: Tom missed the drawing line suggested by SF14 (30 Qg7) and Tarun's 26...Rxf7?? turned a favourable position into a lost one (not sure what he missed). Alex may draw now but 1-3 looks the likely outcome.

cdeb

Armenia have a draw and Uzbekistan have two.

They're both winning one of the remaining games and level in the others, so on course for match wins at this point

Joedryan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119447771#Comment_119447771

Its inhuman this starting time mind, all important events should never have a morning start time in the last rd

RooksPawn

Time trouble turned out to Ireland's advantage. At move 39 Tom's opponent turned his winning position to a roughly equal one and his 40th was a losing blunder. Alex has a R and B of opposite colour ending with equal pawns. Tarun is still playing but should lose. So the Open match looks like finishing 2-2.

In the Women's match, Alice and Lara won so we are 3-0 up and Trisha is in an equal ending now which I expect she will find a way to win eventually.

In the top matches, it looks like wins for ARmenia, Uzbekistan and India-2 but India- v USA is not settled yet.

In the women's, USA, Ukraine and Georgia look like winning their matches,

cdeb

Tom looks to have blundered back in a sharp position - he cashed in early when it came to winning back material. Probably a bit of relief at being given a way back into the match played its part too.

Edit - actually, it's very sharp - so sharp that black has now blundered back and it's forced mate. So that really should be 2-2

RooksPawn

Yes, Tom's opponent might have saved himself with 46...Rh8 but they both overlooked it.

So 2-2 and Trisha's game is the last Irish one running. Her opponent has the B pair but Trisha will probably try to win though it's not obvious how she can.

cdeb

Armenia have won their match, so they're guaranteed second at least, and only Uzbekistan can stop them winning.

Uzbekistan look like winning, but still have to convert on board 4 - and then tie-break comes into it. You would imagine Uzbekistan would win on tie-break as they led coming into the round, but tie-break is Sonneborn-Berger, which can change if your opponents win or lose on the last day, so there'll be some frenzied maths being done about now I think!

Also, yesterday Uzbekistan was awarded the 2026 Olympiad. That's an...interesting venue! Up there with the World Cup in Qatar in terms of potentially legitimising highly dodgy regimes. Not that FIDE were ever too worried about such issues, I guess. (Murder in Samarkand is an exceptional book for anyone interested in that neck of the woods - or indeed geopolitics in general)

Other Irish news from today is that Conor isn't going to get back into the medal standings via the back door.

RooksPawn

Uzbekistan have beaten Netherlands and probably won the olympiad (on tiebreak from Armenia). Their captain Ivan Sokolov and former world champion Ruslan Kasimdzhanov probably had something major to do with this.

ADDED: Trisha just drew so 3.5-0.5 to the women's team.

And Kiolbasa (in the crucial Ukraine-Poland women's match) has thrown it away with 56...g4? instead of Kb5. This could be crucial for tiebreaks if Georgia equal Ukraine on MP.

cdeb

Looks like Azerbaijan and Ukraine will be joint first in the Women's Olympiad after leaders India lost to the US today. Azerbaijan had the edge on tie-break coming into the round, but that can all change today.

Edit - scratch that; Azerbaijan are losing in fact. And in the last game in Ukraine v Poland, Poland have pushed too hard in a drawn position (I presume) and Ukraine are now leading it, so that would give them outright victory.

cdeb

I'm not very good at this...

Georgia's win over Azerbaijan means that they are joint first in the Women's along with Ukraine, and that will also go to tie-break. Ukraine had the edge coming into the round.

So looks like Ukraine and Uzbekistan the winners, ahead of Georgia and Armenia in second.

Just as well the USSR is gone or no-one else would ever win the thing!

cdeb

Chess24's twitter feed has congratulated Uzbekistan and Ukraine on their respective tournament wins. Pending formal confirmation, but they've effectively run the tie-break and I think neither can be caught at this stage.

RooksPawn

The final Open ranking table is at

https://chess-results.com/tnr653631.aspx?lan=1&art=63&flag=30

and from there you can link to all the other results including the Women's olympiad.

So the men's team finished 60th after being seeded 59th so that is par, and we got one GM norm and one IM norm (Tarun's, superfluous probably). Tom's last round win meant we got to 12MP from 11 matches and salvaged some of the rating points he was losing.

Conor finished 5th in the board 2 rankings. Three of those who finished above him had much higher rated opposition in the later rounds, which makes a high Rp attainable with draws.

The team showed itself capable of causing upsets, beating one team that finished above us (Austria) and giving both Iran and Germany a scare before losing by only the minimum margin. Low-rated opposition was disposed of efficiently. The only big setback was the heavy loss to Switzerland.

The women's team finished 59th after a starting rank of 51 thanks to a good win in the last match.

Can anyone answer my question about whether Ireland voted for Dvorkovich, or his opponent or abstained? I think ICU members have a right to know and if the committee don't soon volunteer this information they will have to be quizzed about it at the agm.

Joedryan

Congratulations to Uzbekistan and Armenia, they were both outstanding, feel a bit sorry for Armenia to lose on tie-break, the way they kept on beating teams who out-rated them shows how meaningless ratings are really when you come up against fighters.

Story of the event from an Irish point of view has to be the outstanding play of Conor Murphy to achieve a well earned GM norm. That makes it a successful event for Ireland basically.

cdeb

Couple of notable performances in the Open - we finished one place below third seeds Norway, who ended about 8 game points behind expected score and lost to 52nd seed the Philippines today.

Moldova - who beat Norway yesterday, and England today - finished sixth despite only one GM in their squad (and it wasn't Bologan). An amazing performance for the 48th seeds. They finished nine game points ahead of expected.

But they were outdone by 112nd seeds Sri Lanka, who came 68th, exceeding expected score by 10 points. Their 16-year-old board 3, De Silva L M S T, gained 140 points, which I think is the biggest gain across the entire tournament.

I don't see any outliers close to as large in the Women's tournament, although the gold medal on board 1 has come down (I presume) to decimal places after Pia Cramling (GM) and another 16-year-old, Eline Roebers (no title!), both put in 2532 performances.

RooksPawn

Uzbekistan did win the head-to-head match against Armenia (round 9) by 3-1 so I don't feel so sorry for Armenia except that they lost Aronian by defection.

The lesson that Rex Sinquefield and the US Chess Federation need to take from this is that in Olympiads you want young hungry home-grown players not hired guns. For example, they left at home Hans Niemann (on the cover of the latest New In Chess) who has been on fire lately.

The commentators suggested that jetlag/acclimatisation might have been an issue for the Americans as both their teams improved towards the end.

And India might wonder whether if they had included Arjun Erigaisi in the "second" team instead of Adhiban, the young guys might have done even better. Though it's true that India, with just two bronze medals, paid a high price for Gukesh's meltdown yesterday. But for that it would have been India1 v India2 in the last round.

Moldova were indeed amazing, no player 2500+. Their top board, strangely, got a GM norm with only two wins and a loss (to Harikrishna) but look at the people he drew with in later rounds: Theodorou (2nd best player on bd2), Yilmaz, Jobava, Vocaturo, Carlsen and Adams.

The Irish performance was indeed impressive and the teams gave us something to enjoy following.

In the end, though, we need to build the chess tradition and chess organisation in this country to a much higher level if we are to compete with the teams that caused real upsets in Chennai. There should be at least one chess tournament somewhere in Ireland every weekend, for example. It's just pathetic that the LCU cannot get the City of Dublins organised just because the usual venue is being renovated.

cdeb

A tournament every weekend is needless. You don't have the organisers for a start, and I don't think you have the demand. They'd be small tournaments, and one a week would also drown out the leagues.

We're aiming to run the CoD later in the season this year, and back to normal next year. You have to consider that (a) venues aren't the easiest to get at this moment in time and (b) the LCU committee is probably the smallest it's ever been, half the exec having stood down at the AGM last month. There's also a fair bit of work liaising with clubs to get the leagues back up (some clubs having folded since covid, some having fewer teams, and some being just not very communicative at all). A lack of volunteers (and I invited you on board, but you pointedly refused) doesn't really help.

Millwall

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119450307#Comment_119450307

Agreed @cdeb. Sure we have the CUS to look forward to, as well as learning of the return of the Kilkenny Congress in November! Do you know if the Cork Congress is going ahead this year? Or is that something that only their organisers would know?

cdeb

CUS in September was a consideration too for sure. Bray rapid later this month (in Greystones) and maybe Dún Laoghaire rapid coming up too.

Don't know about Cork I'm afraid; tweet/email the ICU and they might let you know.