FIDE Online Olympiad Playoff Gets Underway
The 2021 FIDE Online Olympiad began over the weekend as the matches of Division 4 were played in five round-robin groups. Hong Kong, Nepal, Lebanon, Kenya, Namibia, Palestine, Angola, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Suriname, Aruba, Ghana, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, and Malawi qualified for Division 3, which takes place August 27-29 with 34 more seeded countries.
The Division 4 games of the FIDE Online Olympiad can be found on our live events platform: Pool A | Pool B | Pool C | Pool D | Pool E. On playing days, expert commentary is provided on Chess.com/TV starting at midnight Pacific / 9:00 a.m. Central Europe.
After a successful first edition in 2020, we're having another online Olympiad during this summer before we can hopefully return to an OTB version again next year. The second online Olympiad started last Friday with five pools, each consisting of 12 teams. Over the weekend, 11 rounds were played in each pool.
Like last year, each team must have six players with at least one U-20 player, at least two women, and at least one U-20 female player. Six reserves and a team captain make up the full roster of each squad.
Due to the crisis in their country, the Afghanistan team had to withdraw from the tournament. Therefore, not only the top three in each pool made it to the third division (played the coming weekend) but also the best fourth-place finisher, which was Malawi.
Let's look at what happened in each of the five pools. (Note that all results remain provisional until all screenings for fair play have finished.)
Live coverage of day three. Watch all of the live coverage at youtube.com/chess.
Pool A
Pool A was for teams in the earliest time zones. Winning the group, Hong Kong was undefeated with nine victories and 3-3 scores against both runners-up, Nepal and Guam. Lebanon was a convincing third qualifier as it finished two match points ahead of Fiji.
The top scorers for the Hong Kong team were boards three, four, and six. Eunice Feng (11/11), Huang Yuen Tung (10.5/11), and WCM Li Joy Ching (10/11) all performed way above their expectations, especially 12-year-old Feng with FIDE 1528 standard rating.
Pool B
This pool had the same final standings with 20, 18, and 17 match points for the top-three teams. Group winner Kenya lost just one match, vs. runner-up Namibia, in the final round. Palestine came third, one match point head of Malawi, who later heard they had qualified as the best number four.
The top scorer for Kenya was Naiya Gosrani with an outstanding unbeaten 7/8.
Pool C
In the other three pools, the winning teams won all their matches. In pool C this was Angola, who grabbed the full 22 match points and 59.5 board points (more than any other team in the whole division) to finish four points ahead of Cyprus. The third qualifier was Ethiopia.
Angola's top scorer was FM Domingos Junior with 7/7.
Ethiopia top chess players passed first round to winning the Chess Olympiad.#ChessOlympiad Let's support all sports. pic.twitter.com/KVDoU5ncNr
— ideashare squred (@ISqured) August 22, 2021
Pool D
Another perfect 22/11 was seen in pool D, where Suriname was in a class of its own. The team won all their matches with a minimum 4.5 score. Aruba came in second, still three points ahead of third-place Ghana.
The strong Dutch club player Peter van den Brink, who used to live in Aruba and now represents that federation, had a nice first warm-up game where he checkmated his opponent in the endgame.
Pool E
Also here we saw a team winning all its matches, in this case, Puerto Rico. Coralys Alvarado scored 10/11 on board six, although four wins were by forfeit. Trinidad and Tobago only lost to the winning team but won the rest. Haiti was the clear third.
Watch these 16 qualifying teams and 34 new teams next weekend (August 27-29) in Division 3. There will be five pools of 10 teams each. All rounds will be live on chess.com/tv.
The FIDE Online Olympiad is a major online chess event for national teams that runs August 20-September 15 on the Chess.com server. More than 1,000 participants and 153 teams from all over the world are playing.
Each team consists of six players, including at least two women, at least one player who is 20 or younger, and at least one female player who is 20 or younger. The time control for all matches is 15 minutes for the game and five seconds increment per move, starting from move one.
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