Chinese women retain title on home ground at World Team Championship

China won the gold medal at the Women's World Team Championship on Saturday in Ningbo, China. The team (Hou Yifan, Zhao Xue, Shen Yang, Ju Wenjun and Huang Qian) finished on 12 match points, just like Russia (silver) and Ukraine (bronze), who collected less board points.

Photo: Ye Rongguang

The Women's World Team Championship took place September 1st-12th in Yinzhou, Ningbo, China. It was a round-robin of ten teams competing, each with five players, and the official FIDE time control was applied: 90 minutes for 40 moves plus 30 minutes and 30 seconds increment.




The championship takes place every other year; the first edition was held in Russia in 2007, when China won. On Saturday they retained their title with four draws against Vietnam in the last round. This allowed Ukraine and Russia, who defeated Armenia and China's second team respectively, to reach the same number of match points (12) but China eventually took gold by half a board point.

Despite the fact that all games in the last round match between China and Vietnam seemed hard fought, it does look a bit like this match was fixed as a draw in advance, as Mark Crowther points out, since Vietnam had a big advantage on board one and a completely winning position on board four when the draws were agreed. You can decide for yourself below in the game viewer.

The best performing players were not on the winning team; IM Nadezhda Kosintseva (Russia) and Lilit Mkrtchian (Armenia) both scored 6.5/9 which was good for a rating performance just over 2600 in both cases. Hou Yifan, who stepped in immediately after the NH Chess Tournament, played rounds 2-6 and 8-9 and again scored somewhat disappointingly (4/7; 2498 performance).

Women's World Team Ch 2009 | Final standings


Women's World Team Ch 2009 | Individual performances

All games >2460 & China-Vietnam r9

Game viewer by ChessTempo

Links

• All statistics at Chess-Results
• Ye Rongguang's photo blog
• Games in PGN