Greetings everyone, I’m going to do my best to give everyone a concise little recap of the news and games I find interesting from the men’s Olympiad. This is going to include individual upsets (with some light commentary on the openings) as well as team upsets and standings.
The first round went pretty smoothly; the favorite teams won fairly easily and without too many hiccups. The live broadcast featuring my main man Lawrence Trent was good and quite enjoyable. It seems every big event FIDE gets better and better and transmitting the games. Additionally the university in Tromso looks epic and they’re commercial was really enticing.
I thought it would be interesting to see whether or not some of these guys have played before as well. There were surprisingly few games between two players that have played before. I found only four total pairs that had played before. So here are the “Rivalries” of the first round:
- Bacrot (FRA) (2720) (3.0) – Chumfwa (ZAM) (2317) (0.0)
- Bruzon (CUB) (2664) (2.0) – Almedina Ortiz (PUR) (2277) (0.0)
- Al-Modiahki (QAT) (2549) (2.0) – Lee (KOR) (2114) (0.0)
- Wei Ming (SIN) (2433) (2.0) – Fancy (PNG) (2036) (0.0)
Without further ado here are the big upsets from the first round of the men’s section:
10. IM Kantans (2496) – IM Madrigal (2156) 0-1
This game comes to us courtesy of the Nicaragua – Latvia match. Our victim is a recently crowned IM with a pretty high rating. His opponent is also an IM (somehow) with a very low rating. The game appeared to be going fairly smoothly until Kantans just blunders and resigns. Goes to show kids, keep playing it out; you never know what could happen. Believe it or not this is the only decisive upset on this list.
9. IM Iyti (2263) – GM Negi (2645) 1/2-1/2
Our next game comes from the India vs Syria match. It’s a bit amazing that this was a draw and that Iyti didn’t manage to win this game after being approximately +5 towards the end.