Olympics, Round 1: No Team Upsets
Round 1 went off pretty much as expected, with the higher-rated teams all crushing their opponents. Quite a few of the top teams rested players (e.g. Kramnik and Aronian), but even so there were plenty of 2700s in action. None were beaten, but four of them were held to draws (Adams and Vachier-Lagrave with Black [the former in just 19 moves in what looks like a creaky position - Adams wisely offered a draw before the trouble was so obvious his opponent would have to refuse despite the 300 point rating gap], Grischuk and Mamedyarov with White).
The only player over 2650 to be upset, as far as I could tell, was Jan Smeets, who got mated with White against his 2391-rated opponent from the Dominican Republic, Lisandro Munoz. (This is not the first time a very strong GM has lost in the Olympiad with White to an unknown player of that name: Bobby Fischer lost to Carlos Munoz on the white side of a Dragon in the Leipzig Olympiad in 1960. So much for "sac, sac, mate"!)
The sensation of the first round was the loss by another GM, the young Turkish player Emre Can. His opponent is one Chieh-Sheng Jason Lin, and if you haven't heard of him don't feel bad: he's rated 1736. Lin may not be a GM in disguise, but he certainly played well above his rating against Can. After a lot of craziness the players reached this position.
It's Black (Can) to move, and after something normal like 44...Qxf4 45.Rxf4 Bxb2 (or 45...Bd4+ first and then 46...Bxb2) a draw is the likeliest result. Black might have a tiny edge there, but he wanted more. He came up with 44...Bd4?? instead, and if you can't figure out what's wrong with it then have a look here. (You can replay this game and the two aforementioned Munoz victories as well.)
Tournament site here.
Reader Comments (11)
Did Quang Liem Le win his game? I thought he was upset in Rd 1.
[DM: He did. Vietnam won 4-0.]
Go Republic of Chi... I mean Taiw... I mean Chinese Taipei!
There's an error on your game's page DM. If it's not too taxing is it possible for you to also include Adams game in your annotations, I'd like to know how creaky it was and why his opponent didn't continue.
[DM: Fixed. It's possible for me to include Adams' game, but I'll pass. Basically, though, White could play something like Qe3, when Black has to handle White's threat while not creating new targets in the meantime. I don't mean that he's lost, but that his position is quite dangerous. As for why, I gave my guess already: he's 300 points lower-rated than Adams.]
I think Tiger lost as well on Bd 2 for Sweden.
Re Le Quang Liem's and Penatala Harakrishna's losses as trumpeted on Chessdom's live blog, official results show otherwise. Chessdom has yet to post a correction!
I spotted, via GM Danny King in his playchess wrap-up, this wonderful conclusion: Berbatov-Chatterjee, from the 1st round.
It is worth a gander because Berbatov went into a pawn endgame a pawn down but he had all the winning chances. It seems, according to Fritz12, that it was just winning for Berbatov!
the papers said that Harikrishna lost ...
Le Quang Liem - FM Khetho (Botswana, 2266) was another crazy or funny game. Black sacrificed a pawn to win a full rook to run into double check and mate, all between moves 15 and 20 and apparently rather forced - quite possible that the rising star GM wasn't "lucky" but had seen everything in advance (before black played 15.-d5!??!).
Indeed, Europe Echecs (and maybe other sources) had mentioned an upset, but corrected it later on - i.e. it is no longer mentioned in the round 1 report on their site. "Had they missed the end of the game?"
Can you find out what the real story is with Yemen and Israel? Most sites say Yemen refused to play and were forfeited, but I'm finding some articles saying that the Yemen national chess team (coaches, players, everyone involved) was canned by their government for playing. A site mentions that some moves are recorded, but another site says they didn't even sit down to begin the round.
It's of course just pathetic politics, but I'd still like to know what actually happened.
Prefer: I don't know either. Maybe you can write Mark Crowther of TWIC about this - he might know or be able to find out.
Thomas: Where did you find the game? TWIC still has the old game score.
Graham: That was cute. Of course Black's extra pawn was obviously meaningless, but it was incredibly easy for him to miss the danger! I'll post on the game later; thanks for passing that along!
People on site say that Yemen players were present in the playing hall but refused to play.
@Dennis: Of all places, at the tournament website - that game looks more plausible than TWIC's version with white losing the queen on move 14 and playing on as if nothing happened ... (of course they must have relied on earlier wrong info). Here are the moves:
1.Nf3 f5 2.c4 Nf6 3.g3 d6 4.d4 g6 5.Bg2 Bg7 6.0-0 0-0 7.Nc3 c6 8.Rb1 Qe8 9.d5 Na6 10.b4 Nh5 11.Qb3 cd5: 12.Nd5: e6 13.Nc3 e5 14.Rd1 Kh8 15.Nb5 d5 [creativity and/or desperation? Black seems positionally lost] 16.Rd5: Be6 17.Re5: Be5: 18.Ne5: Qb5: [white resigns? not yet ...] 19.Qb2 Bc4: 20.Nf7+ and black resigns.
@Prefer: There is a heated discussion at Chessvibes on this, but only people present in Khanty-Mansiysk might know what really happened - e.g. Robert Fontaine for Europe Echecs, according to "ChessGirl" Leontxo Garcia also travelled to Siberia. The tournament website first had game scores which suddenly ended at move 14-20 ... and were identical to the neighboring match Malaysia-England. By now results are given as + - -.