Baku Olympiad, Round 10: U.S. Continues to Lead Ukraine on Tiebreaks Heading into the Final Round (Updated)
Monday, September 12, 2016 at 11:55PM
Dennis Monokroussos in 2016 Chess Olympiad

Only one round is left in the Olympiad, and the United States continues to cling to a lead on tiebreaks over the Ukranian team, and they are guaranteed the top two spots. Russian is two points back (on the 2-1-0 scoring used there) and even if both the U.S. and Ukraine lose and Russia wins the Russians will still come in third on tiebreaks. (That makes six straight Olympiads they have failed to win, despite - I think - being the highest-rated team every time.)

The U.S. defeated Georgia in round 10, 2.5-1.5, but suffered their second loss of the event when Hikaru Nakamura lost with White - pretty badly, too - to Mikheil Mchedlishvili. Fortunately for the Americans, Wesley So beat Levan Pantsulaia and Sam Shankland beat Tornike Sanikidze, so when Fabiano Caruana held off the man of the Olympiad - Baadur Jobava - match victory was secured.

As for Ukraine, they defeated the Czechs 3-1. Pavel Eljanov defeated David Navara with Black on board 1 while Andrei Volokitin won with White on board 4 against Vlastimil Babula. The Russians could have remained within a point of the leaders, but they drew their match with India. Pentala Harikrishna defeated Sergey Karjakin on board 1, while Vladimir Kramnik equaled the score by beating Baskaran Adhiban on board 2.

In the last round, the top pairings look like this:

U.S.A. (18) - Canada (15)
Ukraine (18) - Slovenia (15)
Russia (16) - Italy (15) (If only they had Caruana!)
India (15) - Norway (15) (Likewise, if only India had Anand!)
Peru (15) - England (15)

In the women's section, China leads by two points over Russia...and they play in the last round. If Russia wins the match by more than a point, they win the tournament. If they win by a point, then I'm not sure, but if they don't win, China takes the gold. China has 18 points, Russia 16, and six teams have 15 points, including the United States. If Poland wins their match, no other 15-point team can overtake them, and Ukraine is next in line. Thus if China, Poland, and Ukraine all win their matches, they are likely to take gold, silver, and bronze, respectively.

Before getting to the pairings, it's worth mentioning the horror that was the United States's round 10 match with Mongolia. Katerina Nemcova won on board 3, and the U.S. drew on boards 2 and 4. All that was left was for Irina Krush to hold a minimally worse rook ending on board 1 with plenty of time on her clock. Had she drawn the U.S. would have won the match and entered the last round with 16 points, with the opportunity for a silver medal (but not gold) in their hands. It certainly wouldn't have been guaranteed - they'd have been underdogs against Poland - but they would have had a chance. Unfortunately, Krush made a couple of decisions that were hard to understand, and her opponent took full advantage.

The key final round pairings for the women are as follows, with team points given first and board points given next:

China (18, 28.5) - Russia (16, 27.5)
Hungary (15, 25.5) - Poland (15, 29.5)
Ukraine (15, 27.5) - Bulgaria (15, 26)
U.S.A. (15, 25) - India (15, 26)

A selection of games (all but one unannotated) for your replaying pleasure, here.

UPDATE: The foregoing analysis of the tiebreak situation mistakenly assumed that board points was the first tiebreaker after match points, which is incorrect; it was Sonneborn-Berger. That said, the board points correlates pretty well with S-B, so the conclusions drawn from using the former still turned out to be correct.

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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