ChessBase report Perhaps they should have fixed it so a little bit of excitement could build? This competition is rather disappointing so far, there are not that many teams and it appears some players and teams are not taking it that seriously. Reminds me a bit of the Davis Cup in tennis. There are so many tournaments all year around the top players have to take their breaks somewhere and they quite often ditched this competition to concentrate on the slams or the lucrative Masters series. It's a shame as Sutovsky says that a calendar of events, perhaps arranged in tiers like tennis, can't be arranged between the various organisers. Of course in tennis the financial commitment for slam events are incredible (Wimbledon for instance is close to £15 million) but if you drill down to the lower tier events they aren't a million miles away from some chess events http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/tournaments.Mick Norris wrote:chess.com report
Pity the women's draw had China v Russia in the first round, but I suppose it shows it wasn't fixed
Have to say, pretty decent coverage from Chess24 except that after 15 minutes gone in today's match it wasn't clear how many draw offers the Ukrainians had made to the Russians.