
Australia Narrowly Defeat New Zealand And Will Face England In Round 5!
Australia scooted up the standings at the 2024 Olympiad on Saturday after defeating our "little brother" across the ditch, New Zealand, by a margin of 2.5-1.5 and we will now play our Commonwealth cousins England in round five. Interestingly, a few days ago I received a message from GM Daniel Fernandez, a good friend and one of the team's seconds for this event. In it, he said he "had a sneaking suspicion Australia-England will happen in this event". Our second is so good at preparation that he can predict our future opponents.
*Thanks again to our team sponsors, Integral Diagnostics (IDX), and our uniform sponsor DGT.

In other news, we have just found out that Budapest has announced a stage three flood alert for the Danube. Why does this matter? Well, the low-lying island our hotel is on is smack bang in the middle of the river! Local media suggests that should conditions worsen, Margaret Island would be evacuated and road/pedestrian access would be closed.

FIDE will have to act quickly on this one as numerous teams are staying on the island including one of the tournament favorites China and the prodigy-filled Turkish team. Australian women's team member WFM Giang Nguyen was quick to point out that as Australians we can all swim however we feel for our neighbors who are not aquatically inclined.

We knew that NZ would rise to the occasion and their captain GM Dejan Bojkov opted to play all three of their prodigies: FM Felix Xie, IM Sravan Renjith, and FM Daniel Gong in an attempt to destabilize us.
IM Rishi Sardana was the first to finish his game and given he was playing Black, this was a huge boost for team morale. Rishi's game was a preparation masterclass and on move 11 of a Nimzo-Indian Defense, he was already uncorking a bishop sacrifice that won a pawn cleanly.
A calm conversion ensued and Rishi capped off the game with another instructive sacrifice, this time using a rook as his weapon of choice.
NZ's board one Felix had one of the games of his life in round four and though the FM is no stranger to knocking over the odd GM, his blistering kingside attack against Temur may have been the sweetest win of his career yet.
GM Bobby Cheng vs Sravan, or the battle of the "traitors" as we called it (Bobby was born in New Zealand and Sravan has spent all of his teenage years in Australia) was a tough duel in the Tarrasch and Bobby eventually came out on top.
With the score poised at 2-1, GM David Smerdon was able to clinch the match for Australia with a draw but the late middlegame saw some tense moments where all three results were still possible.
I won't go into too much detail on the women's match today as I have a significant amount of admin work to do with the flood situation worsening however a 2-2 draw with an underrated Singapore leaves them with a great chance to win their round 5 matchup against the 79th seed Costa Rica.