Monday
Aug272012
Olympiad, Round 1: Pairings Are Up!
Monday, August 27, 2012 at 10:26PM
And you can find them here. Other useful resources include the official site and this live commentary (both Russian and English) site.
tagged 2012 Chess Olympiad
Reader Comments (6)
The official Olympiad site has the following text about the Captains' meeting:
"Captains should stay behind their players at all time, no visual contact is forbidden."
Is double negative never forbidden?
[DM: As a good friend of mine used to say, I don't want no negativity!]
Since the teams of Angola, Cameroon and Afganistan in the open section are not paired, can we assume they did not arrive on time? I could not find that info on any of the sites.
Rooting for my 2 nations- England and Trinidad!
Some info on players seems to be missing and I can't get the lve games. Hopefully these issues will be resolved soon!
I thnk England have a good chance to do well. Trini are off to a bad start with FM Ryan Harper losing to the Austrian #1. They are outgunned by an average of about 400 points per board. Ouch.
I can't beleive how many smaller 'minnow' nations participate. Awesome!
As of 12:30 EDT on day 1, the underdog is defeating the overwhelming favorite in all 10 matches involving teams ranked 21-30. In most cases, the margin of victory is overwhelming, like 3-1 or 4-0. I strongly suspect that the Turkish organizers switched the teams/players accidentally. But if not, this is by far the most sensational day 1 in the history of the Olympiad.
The website shows GM Gawain Jones playing the first round as the first board both for England and for Wales. He drew one game and won the other. Quite a feat!
On a more serious note, I truly enjoyed my fellow countryman Osvaldo Zambrana beating Armenian GM Movsesian in a very nice, tense game.
Late entry:
1. Armenia
2. Russia
3. Ukraine
4. China
5. Netherlands (voting my highest reasonable hopes here)
6. USA
(Here's me hoping my comment gets through this time :-D)