Tromso Olympiad Recap: Rd. 5

Hello everyone, the picture of the girl that you all see is Luzia Pires (courtesy of David Llada), the legend from the third round who beat a WIM in 8 moves. I would like to offer an apology, I made an omission yesterday that I would like to clear up today. In what could possibly be the shortest victory in the history of the Olympiad someone in the women’s section fell into this ridiculous trap:

We still aren’t sure what the deal is with this game and we may never find out. Many on twitter had commented that they believe that something fishy had occurred (collusion, revenge, losing on purpose, etc…). More than a few people on twitter had called for the expulsion of the player who played black. I don’t have an answer for you but I will say that I think this quality of chess is absurd and that in the future they should institute some sort of rating minimum and try and vet the players somehow. Everyone plays a bad game from time to time (some more frequently than others) but it requires real talent to lose in 3 moves. Enough of this garbage chess, let’s move on to the topics that we all care about.

Top 5 Teams:

We welcome the unlikely team from Kazakhstan to the top five for the first time. Amusingly the Norwegian second team is now ranked 19th, which is a full 19 places ahead of the first Norwegian team.

Rank SNo Country Games + = TB1 TB2
1 8 Azerbaijan 5 4 1 0 9 82.0
2 29 Serbia 5 4 1 0 9 77.0
3 49 Kazakhstan 5 4 1 0 9 73.5
4 18 Bulgaria 5 4 1 0 9 71.0
5 13 Cuba 5 4 1 0 9 69.0

Team Upsets:

  1. Serbia drew with Azerbaijan
  2. Bulgaria drew with Russia
  3. The Netherlands drew with China
  4. Uzbekistan defeated the Ukraine 2.5 – 1.5
  5. Cuba defeated Israel 2.5 – 1.5

Rivalries:

This round saw what is perhaps the biggest and most heated rivalry in all of chess: Kramnik vs Topalov. There is some serious bad blood between these two after their World Championship match later dubbed “Toiletgate”.

Games Played Country Name Rating Score Country Name Rating
92 BUL Topalov 2772 52.0 – 40.0 RUS Kramnik 2760
72 NOR Carlsen 2877 36.0 – 36.0 ARM Aronian 2805
21 UKR Ivanchuk 2744 9.5 – 11.5 UZB Kasimdzhanov 2700
18 HUN Leko 2740 12.0 – 6.0 ESP Vallejo Pons 2698
14 CUB Dominguez 2760 6.0 – 8.0 ISR Gelfand 2753
6 NED Giri 2745 3.5 – 2.5 CHN Yue 2718
5 BLR Zhigalko 2678 3.5 – 1.5 AUT Ragger 2644
5 ARM Movsesian 2672 2.0 – 3.0 NOR Hammer 2628

Perfect Scores:

It is amazing that anyone still has a perfect score; but it is a true testament to Iotov for defeating Karjakin with black which was the reason Bulgaria didn’t lose the match with Russia. This guy is on FIRE!

You may notice that there is a sub 1900 player on the list; he also appears on my list of upsets for his victory this past round over an FM rated 300 points higher than him. Kudos to you Lee Jun Hyeok!

Ranking Games Country Title Name Rating Score % Board Perf.
1 5 BUL GM Iotov 2553 5.0/5.0 100 3 3277
2 4 MKD GM Svetushkin 2547 4.0/4.0 100 2 3169
3 4 UKR GM Moiseenko 2707 4.0/4.0 100 5 3176
4 4 USA GM Shankland 2624 4.0/4.0 100 5 3105
5 4 KOR N/A Lee Jun Hyeok 1884 4.0/4.0 100 5 2377

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