Chess Olympiad 2020
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Chess Olympiad
It was the day of the Final Showdown, India VS Russia,
India who was for the first time in the Finals VS Number 1 seated team.
In Round 1 the match up were,
Vidit Santosh Gujrathi VS Ian Nepomniachtchi.
Harikrishna Pentala VS Artemiev Vladislav.
Koneru Humpy VS Kateryna Lagno.
Harika Dronavalli VS Alexandra Kosteniuk.
Praggnanandha R VS Aleksy Sarana.
Divya Deshmukh VS Polina Shuvalova.
Result- India and Russia drew with the score of 3-3.
Indeed the finals everyone was expecting the matches were so intense and position was so complex.
On Board 1, Vidit outclassed Nepo and was seemingly winning but the caliber Nepo had he rook sacrificed making the game complicated thereafter forcing Vidit for a draw.
On Board 2, Harikrishna, our endgame expert did pushed the game to the endgame in which he had the bishop pair against his opponent having a bishop and a knight but the game on the king side only which ended in a draw.
On Board 3, Humpy drew the game after having a dominate position thereafter giving queen for and going in a queen vs two rook game and managed to be two pawns up but her opponent got one tactical shot where she managed a draw.
On Board 4, Harika seemed to have a slight disadvantage but she managed a draw.
On Board 5, Praggnanandha was s pawn up but at the end game all the pieces got exchanged which concluded in a draw.
On Board 6, Divya had an equalish game and drew by a perpetual.
In second round, whoever wins will be the champion or if they again drew then it will go to Armageddon.
There were two changes for India and three changes for Russia this show how much of the bench strength both the team possess.
Viswanathan Anand sir and Nihal Sarin were joining us for round 2 and Daniil Dubov, Aleksandra Goryachkina and Andrey Esipenko were players for Russia.
As the game were continuing on,
Anand Sir, Vidit and Harika managed to a draw, and Humpy, Nihal and Divya were still having there matches.
Humpy was quite under pressure and had a quite losing position, Nihal was in a disadvantage but managed to equalise the position and Divya was full beast mode crushing her opponent and suddenly both Nihal and Divya connection got lost and had to forfeit the match on time. Humpy too had lost a significant amount of time but she managed to reconnect but after lost of tempo she couldn't hold herself and lost.
Soon as the incident happened Vice Captain Srikanth appealed as there was no connection problem on behalf of the players and both of them can't lose connection at the same time being in different cities.
The appeal was made official and was asked to find a solution as stated by the Vice Captain Srikanth.
FIDE looking into the matter tweeted,
"In the second round of #ChessOlympiad final match India vs Russia, two Indian players Nihal Sarin and Divya Deshmukh lost connection to their game and forfeited on time. India filed an official appeal, the issue is now being investigated.
This was soon followed by a tweet by Chess.com stating,
"As many enthusiastic fans noted, @cloudflare issues unfortunately affected connections to Chess.com and other sites for many members today. This is likely the cause of India's connection issue in the Finals, we did not observe any server issue during the Finals.
So many speculation was going on the Appeal Committee was discussing the matter.
How to resolve the issue, by the current position the outcome could have been in various ways. So all of the viewers including the players were confused, speculations such as should the games of those three players should be started or the the whole round should be started or the matches should be started from the same position. Nonetheless in any situation it could have been unfair for one team or the other.
But then the FIDE tweeted,
" FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich made a decision to give both gold medals of FIDE online #ChessOlympiad to both teams- India and Russia. More details and official statement to follow.
It was quite surprising as no one expected this result. But after so many ups and downs, it was amazing that the game of chess won as it skyrocketed to 68 thousand views on live streaming with many top rated players commentating on the live games.
And at last the the 14th World Champion Vladerik Kraminik stated that both teams won in the live stream and as so what happened as it was so exciting and thrilling to witness the amount of passion the players put into their matches.
Congratulating both the teams for winning the gold medal and hope the game of chess will reach new heights.
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