Open City Swiss 2015 Winners

Dear colleagues!

About a month ago I have published the final standings of Open Cities Swiss season 2015 and no changes of results have come since then - which means that it is high time to congratulate the winners.

Each among four leading teams won 7 matches and lost one, which only shows how tight the competition was. The first additional criterion is Buchholz coefficient, showing which team had the strongest opponents.

The gold medals are won by Дружба

This team is formed by teachers and students from real-life chess school active in Aramil and Oktiabrskoye, two satellites of Yekaterinburg, the center of Ural region.

The silver goes to

Team Babylon, uniting Iraqi players, who seek the spiritual restoration of their country through its glorious footprint in human culture.

The bronze medals are shared by team Moscow,  

and Metz the chess TT team, a magnificent assembly of chess devotees from this marvelous French city.

It is remarkable that Drujba abd Metz occupied two last places in the "Power" rating used to form the start list of the competition.

This shows that there are values far beyond the number and rating of players, that team integrity, solidity and the willingness to fight "all for one and one for all" are more important than recruiting most active players and other tricks.

It is inspiring that our competition, based on the principles of openness, democracy and structural horizontality, reveals true to them.

We've had 41 participating teams and almost 2000 players (yes, two thousands of unique players) in 198 scheduled matches, of which only 9 were not played - 4% of forfeits is unprecedented compared to ~50% of wasted efforts in some other city competitions.

Of course, this would not have been possible without active help of every team admin and player, which all should be proud of their efforts regardless of the place.

I thank and congratulate everyone and  hope that the ongoing Season 2016 will be equally interesting.