Today is a day-off and probably the coldest day during our staying here. The temperature is around 30, which is relatively low for India in summer. It's going to be around 33-35 again before our departure. For some reason, the hottest month in Chennai is May with the average temperature around 38. August is slightly less hot with the average around 35. That means, we got better weather than I expected.

So far, our team also is playing better than many expected. We played with 4 top-20 teams (Czechia, Iran, Netherlands, Romania) in the first 6 rounds. Only 1 team played against 3 top-20 teams (India-1), any other team played 2 matches or less against top-20. 1 win, 2 draws and 1 loss is a very good performance for 44th ranking against such a strong field.

Color alternation is less important for team event and we played 4 blacks in the last 5 matches, which is extremely unlikely in any individual event. As a result, we got some funny color distribution among team players. Raja played all 5 games with white, Nikolay - all 5 games with black, Razvan played 4 whites and just 1 black and Eric - 4 blacks and 1 white.

While it was my idea to give more black games to Nikolay and more white games to Razvan, I absolutely had no intention to give Nikolay 5 blacks in a row. However, it still may be good for our team performance, as Nikolay shows 2500+ performances with black so far and Razvan has 3.5 /4 with white. On today's team meeting we joked that Nikolay has a chance to be the first (and last) ever player who gets GM norm playing only black.

But no, Nikolay plays white tomorrow against Scotland.

Maili joined today to our traditional "after breakfast" table-tennis and we had 6 Canadian players, including Raja, Nikolay, Razvan, Artiom, Maili and myself for funny "almost round-robin" tournament. Maili played strongly and fully deserved second place. Honestly, it was a great surprise for me to see table tennis in hotel here in India, there this is not so popular.