Olympiad R3: Croatia holds Ukraine

General info
The 39th Chess Olympiad takes place September 20th – October 3rd at the Tennis Sport Development Center in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia. 148 teams (735 players) in the Open section and 114 teams (559 players) in the Women section participate in the biannual event.Each team consists four players and one reserve. The rate of play is 90 minutes for 40 moves and then 30 minutes to finish the game, with 30 seconds increment from move one.Results round 3 | Open section | top 20 boards
Results round 3 | Women section | top 10 boards
Complete results and standings can be found here
Round 3 report
Except for the more or less standard game transmission problems on the first day, the Olympiad website has been a joy to visit so far. Interestingly, on the second day it already saw a change in design, which makes it slightly more difficult to find the live-games-without-computer-annotations, but content-wise it's just excellent, with a wide variety of articles. However, the romance story between Sophie Milliet and Yannick Pelletier seems to be removed from the site...Update 14.48: during the fourth round the official website has been down for quite a while again. Grumbl. At least they can say Facebook isn't doing much better this week.Back to the tournament, where the third round saw few surprises. At the top of the pairings a strange match took place between Ukraine and Croatia. Two draws and two black victories held the balance: Efimenko beat Saric but Moiseenko lost to Palac.After beating Adams, Ivan Sokolov (playing for Bosnia & Hercegovina) also won with Black against Poland's number one Wojtaszek.

Thanks to Miton, who beat Kurajica, this match ended in 2-2. Mexico limited the damage against Georgia to 1.5-2.5 due to a fine win from Leon Hoyos against Jobava. Kamsky seems in excellent shape and scored another nice victory with the white pieces, on board 1 of the USA-Chile match.


A nice thing of these Olympiads is that you suddenly see a lot of different, often ancient opening variations. In the game Lopez Silva-Hess from the same match, White went all romantic with 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. O-O Nf6 5. d4 Bxd4 6. Nxd4 Nxd4 7. Bg5 h6 8. Bh4 Qe7 9. f4 Qc5 10. Bxf7+?! Kxf7 11. Bxf6 gxf6 12. fxe5 Qxe5 but in the 21st century that's not such a good idea.Long-time visitors of this site know that we've been a fan of David Navara for years. It seems he's becoming quite a strong 2700 player, as he beat former world title contender Peter Leko convincingly yesterday.



France vs Israel was a 2-2 tie. On board one Maxime Vachier-Lagrave beat Boris Gelfand in an Anti-Moscow where the 19th (!) move was a novelty compared to a Joop van Oosterom correspondence game. After a long series of logical moves, Black suddenly found himself in a lost rook ending. Food for thought and analysis for the theoreticians.


45. Bxc5 Qxc5 46. Qd3 and White won.
England beat South Africa with 3-1; FM Steel managed to beat Luke McShane, who went all or nothing with a piece sacrifice, which looked "too brilliant for me" - words used by Nigel Short once, when the author of this report suggested a move during a post-mortem at the Essent tournament in Hoogeveen. The same Short had a nice finishing touch against Kobese.

In the Women section, fifth seeded Russia 2 dropped a match point against Germany, where all four games ended in a draw. Today we see some very big matches for the first time. In the open tournament there's Russia 1 vs USA and Hungary-China, and the women section has Georgia-Russia 1.

Anatoly Karpov, running for FIDE President, at his stand
Photos courtesy of FIDE, more at the official site
Selection of games
Game viewer by ChessTempo
Links
- Official website
- All details at Chess-Results
- Games in PGN: Open | Women via TWIC (Mark Crowther put a huge amount of work into generating a programme for processing the games and he now seems to have more games and in better shape than the official site.)
- Chessbase, the biggest portal for chess news
- TWIC, more news and by far the best source for games
- Chessdom, with news & live games
- Europe-Eches with news in French and videos in English & French
- Susan Polgar blogging
- Shaun Press blogging
- GM David Smerdon blogging
- GM Jon Ludvig Hammer blogging
- The Chess Drum
- Alexandra Kosteniuk blogging
- Jan Gustafsson blogging
- Chess in Translation with OIympiad articles
- Simon Williams' blog