OLYMPIAD 2008 :):)

[Richard Bates]

Would you extend that to match chess as a whole - club matches, for instance? (I don't know how many leagues prefer game points to match points:)

Justin i could have sworn i have been fairly clear that my arguments relate to Swiss competitions...

Most of the advantages as i see it and as i have argued, of using game pts over match pts, or alternatively the disadvantages of match pts over games pts, simply don't apply in all-play-all competitions. There is no question of teams benefiting from favorable pairings and there is no automatic stabilisation created by large wins resulting in tougher matches because pairings are pre-determined. And since every team has played every other, there are better grounds for claiming that the winner is the best matchplay team if that is what you are looking for.

BTW you are the one who uses the phrase "match chess". In the Olympiad context i have consistently used "team chess".

[Mick Norris]

I think though to have a chance a team would need a top board in better nick than Adams appears to be.

He gets to play Kramnik, presumably, tomorrow, so we'll see if he can hold a draw

[Ben Purton]

"an unknown like Caruana"

O dear, hes far from unknown.

Ben

[David Robertson]

Too right. I'd tried to get him for Liverpool this year, but he was too expensive! Vachier-Lagrave, Laznicka, Baradmidze, & Howell I could get. Caruana, no way could I afford

David
Atticus CC

[James Toon]

I think I must have meant "not in the same league as the super-GMs filling the top slots in the FIDE rating list". I should choose my words more carefully.

[JustinHorton]

Fantastic win by the England women's team yesterday.


....and if I read this properly, Dagne is the only woman with a score of 5/5 so far.

[Ben Hague]

Personally I think that if you use game points then it's more of a contest to see who has the best 4 players rather than who has the best team. Both are reasonable goals, but for the first case you might as well just look at the rating list as that would be more accurate. I think there's something special about being the last player going and knowing it all depends on you. I can think of three really memorable games I've played like that, and it just wouldn't have been the same if it had just meant an extra half point.

Also, the way it distorts the value of a draw makes some interesting changes to the game. When a draw can go from being worth as much as a win to being worthless within the space of a few minutes your thinking and evaluations have to be much more flexible than would be the case in a tournament game. This means that just as the best tournament player isn't necessarily the best match player, so the best four tournament players aren't guaranteed to be the best team which makes things much more interesting for me.

[Jonathan Rogers]

This is my first post on the forum; hello to those who know me.

I agree that Caruana is well known: I mean, he must be the most prominent player with Italian nationality since Greco. But beating Adams with Black must be his best individual result so far, surely? I always thought that Adams was particularly effective against younger players (remember him beating Nakumara and Radjabov with Black in Tripoli 2004?) but now I am not so sure - his score against Carlsen is terrible, this was not even his first Olympiad loss to him ...

Anyway, I just wanted to second the above poster - what a great result for the English women v Lithuania, even if we have poached their second strongest player. And we have two players on 100% in that team, I might add (Kanwal Bhatia has 3/3). So far they are overperforming more clearly than the men, I would say: they played one of the top seeds and another team seeded a little way above them.

The men are a bit unlucky to go straight from playing Italy to playing Russia, I think (if I were provocative, I would say that in the old days they would have had to beat Italy 4-0 for that to happen...)

[JustinHorton]

This won't be boring.....we've got a Chigorin!

[Ian Kingston]

England's strategy against Russia is interesting: provocative Black openings, solid White ones. All designed to encourage the Russians to overreach themselves. It looks to me as though they're playing to win.

I can dream, can't I?

[JustinHorton]

Didn't Short want to run this strategy a couple of times twenty years ago?

I notice that Kramnik has, in fact, tried to select as unintersting a variation of the Chigorin as he can (in Khalifman's first "opening according to Kramnik" series, the recommendation is 4.Nc3 and 5.Bf4, i.e. n oexchange of d5 for a bit longer).

I don't much like Howell's h3 and Nd2-f1 before castling.

[Ian Kingston]

Didn't Short want to run this strategy a couple of times twenty years ago?

In John Nunn's Best Games, p. 201, Nunn describes such an occurrence at the 1989 World Team Championship. Short and Chandler wanted to take a few chances in order to go for a win against the USSR; other players, including Nunn, wanted a more conservative approach.

The difference then was that England were serious medal contenders with an outside chance of gold. Despite their success so far, this time it's hard to see England as having anything other than a very slim chance of bronze. They really have nothing to lose: win the match, and they're covered in glory; lose (even 4-0), and there'll be a good chance to make up ground against less fearsome opposition.

[JustinHorton]

Oh, for sure, it's very different circumsatnces. I just thought it an entertaining irony that Nosher finally gets to play it that way a generation later.

[Ian Kingston]

Agreed!

[James Toon]

The first result - Moro forces an early draw by repetition against Jones. This in a position where Jones was a pawn up following a tactic on e4 which Moro must, unbelievably, have missed. A moral victory for the good guys.