Congratulations to our Olympiad teams!
Congratulations to our Olympiad team and captain Victor Plotkin who were rated 25th at the start of the tournament and finished 11th with 7 match wins, 1 draw, 3 losses (to the two co-winners USA and Ukraine and to England all by 2.5 – 1.5 scores). Canada beat 3 other teams ranked above us at the start of the event (Belorus, Latvia and Cuba). We also came very close to beating Ukraine and the U.S. with games that could have had the opposite result and resulted in the opposite match result.
Particular congratulations to Anton Kovalyov who scored 80% on board 2 and took the individual silver medal. He finished second only to Vladimir Kramnik on second board and had a rating performance of 2852 and gained almost thirty rating points. Eric Hansen also had an impressive performance rating of 2738 and was deadly with the white pieces. Evgeny Bareev held down first board and took on five players rated 2720 or higher including Fabio Caruana at over 2800 and made the Canadian performance possible by taking on every team's stud player. Alexander Lesiege and Tomas Krnan played mostly black and came up with key wins on a regular basis and both enjoyed rating gains in a very tough tournament.
We were 4th overall after 10 rounds but dropped to 11th after our last round lost to the USA.
So for sure this was an exciting result that we should be crowing about. 1 match point more and we would have been in the 4th-10th group!
Also a big congrats to our womens’ team who was rated 39th, finished = 31st-43rd with +6 =1 – 4. Yuanling Yuan on second board had an impressive performance gaining 38 rating points with a performance rating of 2355. Qiyu Zhou spent the first six days without her luggage and battling the same intestinal distress that affected much of the Canadian delegation including our arbiter Aris Marghetis who was parked on first board for much of the event until the participation of the Canadian team on first board in the last round pushed him to another section. Aris chose to simplify his diet to rice and potatoes while I loaded up on bread in order to soothe the intestinal flora and fauna.
The plan had been to reverse the board order of Yuanling and Qiyu but the team captain Aman Hambleton was not aware of the general rule that you should show up three hours before an international flight and was refused entry an hour before and so this plan was available only in his head which was many thousands of miles away. The players may have known about it but again this was not communicated to us and so we had the players playing in rating order. When our plane which Aman was booked on from Paris to Baku arrived about an hour and a half late Hal Bond and I were spirited to the captain's meeting without that bit of information. The captain's meeting and the all important online codes and player cards were waiting for us.
Lali Agbabishvili also went without her luggage for the start of the tournament but settled in and held serve gaining a few rating points. Maili-Jade who seemed to play everywhere this summer also played steady chess and gained about a dozen rating points. Both were plus two.
Anybody interested I’d start with http://chess-results.com/tnr232875.a...flag=30&wi=821
I hope the players, captains, Hal Bond and Aris Marghetis are doing better fighting jet lag than I have been able to though lately I have been trending toward normal hours.
