China Wins World Title To Follow Olympic Gold

On Tuesday China won the World Team Championship in Tsaghkadzor, Armenia. The Olympic champions finished three match points ahead of Ukraine; Armenia came third.

From our report after the fifth round we know that Russia had a horrible start in Tsaghkadzor. It had already dropped six match points and was out of contention for gold. In the end, the top seed didn't even win a medal.

For a long time, the fight went between Ukraine and China, who were both sitting on eight match points after five rounds.

The sixth round took place after the rest day. On that day, April 24, Armenians around the world had something else on their minds. (Fittingly, the tournament website was completely in black and white, which you can still see when you click on "Day 6.")

Both China and Ukraine won their round six matches, and in similar fashion: draws on boards one, two and three, and decisive results on board four.

For China it was the young star GM Wei Yi who sealed the deal against Israel. The 15-year-old grandmaster played fantastic chess in Tsaghkadzor, with five wins and four draws. After gaining 15.9 Elo points he is now 34th in the world in the live ratings list with 2717.5.

GM Yuriy Kryvoruchko was the match winner for Ukraine against Cuba. It was a game where the white player clearly had himself to blame, with several unforced errors and a self-mate to top it off.

Russia scored its second straight win: 2.5-1.5 against India. Armenian and Hungary played 2-2 and USA defeated Egypt 3-1.

The top encounter between China and Ukraine was played in round seven and ended in 2-2:

Here's Ivanchuk's convincing win over Yu, who really didn't stand a chance. In a difficult position he dropped an exchange, and after that Chuky was very accurate. When every single bit of counterplay was neutralized, Yu resigned.

USA scored an excellent win over Israel, with another 2700-draw for Shankland (against Gelfand), a loss for Onischuk (versus Smirin) but wins for Lenderman and Naroditsky (versus Sutovsky and Postny respectively). Look what happend to Sutovsky's king!

Russia suffered yet another loss, this time to Armenia. Three games were drawn, but GM Sergey Karjakin went down against GM Gabriel Sargissian. Something went wrong early on, because White was controlling everything more or less from the start. An impressive game!

GM Richard Rapport was incredibly creative again in his game with GM Ahmed Adly, who joined the party with some inventive moves as well. It's enough to mention the opening moves and you'll want to see the whole game: 1.b3 a5 2. e4 a4 3.b4 e6 4.Bb2 d5 5. a3 dxe4 6. Nc3 Nf6 7.g4!?. Eventually the Egyptian player came out on top:

The eighth round was a key one for the tournament. Ukraine suffered a surprising defeat against USA, who drew on boards one, three and four but won board two. The hero of the day was GM Aleksandr Lenderman, who brought down the mighty GM Vassily Ivanchuk:

Meanwhile, China simply continued winning: a solid 3-1 without losses against Cuba. Here's another nice one from Wei Yi, who used his king in the endgame to create a checkmake pattern:

Ukrained dropped another match point in the final round against Hungary. China defeated India and thus finished three match points ahead of the pack. A most convincing win for the Olympic champions, who can now call themselves world champions too.

Here's the long battle between Sethuraman and Yu:

It's no surprise that Wei Yi had the best performance on board four. Both GM Yuniesky Quesada Perez (Cuba) and GM Evgeny Tomashevsky (Russia) scored 5.5/8 on board three. GM Aleksandr Lenderman had the best percentage score on board two, with 5.0/7.

With an undefeated 6.0/9, GM Levon Aronian scored the best on board one.

2015 World Team Championship | Final Standings

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The Chinese team with their gold medals and cup. | Photo Arman Karakhanyan.

The World Team Championship took place April 18-29 at the Golden Palace Hotel Resort & Spa in Tsaghkadzor, Armenia.