English Chess Forum

Probably better to discuss specific results and games here.

England currently (round 1) 2.5-0.5 up against Andorra with Howell's game left to finish.

Thanks Chris, I am just lazy like most chess players.

Well, Garcia on board 3 has blundered again - shame, he'd played really well. That's his game of the Olympiad. Anyway 3.5-0.5.

Amazing - a group of Grand Masters from Georgia has lost to a bunch of unknowns from the Yemen. Ricky George and Ronnie Radford all over again, with the Georgians having to play on a muddy, bumpy, pitch.

Hello everyone, I guess this is the official ECF Olympiad thread.

My experience on watching the games was not brilliant today, only caught the tail end of Howell's win.

After Movsesian's defeat, a few more shocks: van Wely loses to a 2354 IM from Malaysia, Bologan to a 2358 from Pakistan and Vescovi a 2242 from Algeria. Is this a mistake on the website, or have Romania really lost 2.5-1.5 to Syria? Also Latvia supposedly 0.5-3.5 to Uganda, surely that must have been entered wrongly?

David Gilbert wrote:Amazing - a group of Grand Masters from Georgia has lost to a bunch of unknowns from the Yemen. Ricky George and Ronnie Radford all over again, with the Georgians having to play on a muddy, bumpy, pitch.

Doh! Too amazing to be true - the result has been reversed in favour of the Georgians!

The website is all over the shop. Gawain Jones has now lost on Boards one and four......for Wales!

David Gilbert wrote:The website is all over the shop. Gawain Jones has now lost on Boards one and four......for Wales!

Anyone called Jones must be from Wales, isn't that obvious?

Other results which do sound right is that our women won 4-0, Scotland men by 3.5-0.5 but Ireland men lead the way with 4-0.

Chess is a global and universal language, with the amount of confidence that has been given to the global computing industry by the use of chess in terms of a benchmark. Could not all the genius's out there that administer the internet pipes, ensure us coverage of our heroes as they destroy all and sundry

David Gilbert wrote:The website is all over the shop. Gawain Jones has now lost on Boards one and four......for Wales!

A reliable source of results is the chess-results.com site which is at
http://results.chessolympiadistanbul.co ... =1&flag=30 for Olympiad coverage. This also has the team compositions before play starts.

The results linked to the live boards are as noted, erratic. It doesn't appear that they are reliably downloading the "who is playing where" from the chess-results server.

In my opinion, best team result of the day from the Open would be IBCA against Bulgaria and best individual results would be the IPCA board 1, Ugandan board 4, Malaysia board 1, and Bolivia board 1 (assuming they're all correct).

From the Women's section the Turkish youth team came closest to causing an upset along with Thailand, and the most notable individual results were El Salvador's board 3, the Jordanian board 2, and Costa Rica's board 3.

The Olympiad pairing rules are here: http://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html? ... ew=article

The problem with this pairing system is that you open up the possibility for all sorts of strange pairings in round 2.

It only needed 7 fewer 4-0 wins today out of the 70odd games in the Open, and Ukraine and Russia would have played tomorrow. It can't be desirable for the top 2 teams by seeding in the event to meet in round 2.

It also seems odd to reseed by gamepoints for pairing purposes within a scoregroup, but in the end of tournament tie-break, a sort of Sonnenborn-Berger excluding the lowest scoring opponent is the first tiebreaker, before gamepoints.

I've banged on about this for two years now, and I'm still no closer to understanding why this system is used!