Olympiad round 6 pairings are:
open board 3 USA playing black against Germany
Women black against Canada on board 15
I believe round 6 will be played on Monday after a rest day. Is anyone covering the Bermuda party?
Here’s hoping the day off helps our players. The women’s team in particular seems to be under-performing. (The good news is that the Olympiad is a long event, so there’s time to climb back into it.) It will be interesting to hear some of the back story from this event, which Mike Klein is pretty good about reporting.
I looked at some chess news this morning and read the following from Chessbase.com:
“The US suffered a devastating 3-1 loss against Vietnam, who gave up an average of 158 rating points to the Americans. Perhaps the US players were bored to death with the lifeless London System showing up on boards 1 and 3 and dropped their defences, losing those games. Interestingly enough boards 2 and 4 both saw Caro-type formations for the Vietnamese ladies, where they split the games.”
Later, I looked at Susanpolgarblogspot.com and found this:
“The US suffered a devastating 3-1 loss against Vietnam who gave up an average of 158 rating points to the Americans. Perhaps the US players were bored to death with the lifeless London System showing up on boards 1 and 3 and they dropped their defences losing those games. Interestingly enough boards 2 and 4 both saw Caro-type formations for the Vietnamese ladies where they split the games.”
Hmmm. The Polgar piece just has a few missing commas and added the word “they” in the second line, but is otherwise identical to the Chessbase paragraph. Who is copying who? Polgar’s blog has no mention of Chessbase or any indication that the reports in her site were not written by her. Neither does the Chessbase site. So, who is copying who, or are they both copying from someone else?
Dan (DWL1945) mentioned Polgar’s catty comments about the US women team, so I looked at them too:
“After only 5 rounds, the US is in 29th place and nearly out of medal contention. This is very disappointing. In order to be successful, the program has to be run in a professional way and not based on ridiculous political decisions. The Women’s Olympiad program I started in 2002-2003 which lead to unprecedented success for the US for the next 4-5 years has been completely abandoned. It has been reverted back to the old failed way in previous decades.”
Yikes.
Perhaps there is a simpler explanation for our Women’s team’s performance – the celebratory champagne provided by their coach after squeaking out a drawn match earlier. More of that $8 coffee and less booze might help. At least the Russian team can handle the vodka. It’s part of their training.
They are both copying from the official site, chessolympiadistanbul.com/
During his first year on the EB, Paul Truong was very up-front about the fact that most of the news on Susan’s blog was material they had found on other online sites.
Thanks. It’s very magnanimous of the official site to write a report and not be upset if other websites cut and paste the report and make it look like it was their work. I wouldn’t do it if I had a website. I would prominently add something like: “As reported by chessolympiadinstanbul.com”.
I don’t know about the Polgar site, but Chessbase does have a note that reads: “Summaries from the official web site, photos by David Llada, Arman Karakhanyan, Anastasiya Karlovich.”
Perhaps they could make it more prominent, but they do give an attribution.
Thanks. I saw that a few minutes ago, but you beat me to it. Their little attribution is hidden beneath a table of round 5 standings. At least they have something. Maybe the Polgar site also has a hidden attribution. Can anyone find it?
I thought the celebratory champaigne was for the surprise birthday party. Really a good attempt to increase team morale, but the rest day will do some good.
“Oh Canada”, just kidding of course, GO USA!!!
David A. Cole
Quite correct. I’m sure WGM Foisor appreciated the thoughtful gesture from her teammates.
From the few attributed comments in the reports so far, it seems that IM Zatonskih thinks she’s not in form. Team events are always a bit different (even for experienced internationals, I would imagine). One player can affect the mood and performance of the entire team, in either direction.
There’s still time for both teams to do some damage. The women are going to need big margins in the next several rounds just to claw back to a higher table. Fortunately, they should be set up for that. For the men, the problem isn’t so much their score, but rather the Murderer’s Row they’ll likely have to go through to win a medal. Complicating matters further is that they’re likely to have to beat at least one of those teams now to make up ground.
The US women team outrates the Canadian women team by about 400 points per board. This should be a 4-0 win. The US Open team is only slightly higher rated than the German Open team.
Polgar’s blog today presents Franc Guadalupe’s remarks of yesterday. The comment section has the ubiquitous “anonymous” writing: " Only heard about Susan Polgar and Franc Guadalupe. Never heard of the other people. How did they get their position? Did they pay for it?"
Obviously not written by a native English speaker. The language is somewhat spicey with just a hint of paprika. 
I come back from videoing the Kramnik press conference and sit down not paying attention to who is sitting next to me. It was Peter Leko with his 6th round opponent GM Wojtaszek analyzing their game. The room we are in is not meant for a live video capture because of sound but I grabbed it anyways.
It’s up here - youtube.com/watch?v=PCrrWJxLIJo&feature=plcp
Woman win over Canada 3.5 - .5 the draw was on board 4
Open section draw 2-2 against Germany with 4 draws.
Round 7 pairings open white vs Turkey
Women white vs Belguim
Win 18th and need to win big.
Open 12th and need to win.
IMHO, IM Goletiani got incredibly lucky to draw that board 4 game. She’s definitely off her usual form. Hopefully, she’s not playing through any physical or personal issues.
(Note: my admittedly hasty evaluation came from playing through the moves of her game while having lunch during today’s session of the Ohio Chess Congress. With that caveat out of the way…it looks like her opponent is just plain winning right around the time control.)
Whatever cushion either of our teams had is mostly (if not entirely) gone. The men have to start breaking through in some of these matches against top-15 or top-20 teams. As for the women, they could stand to hang a bagel or two on their next few opponents. With their high seed, they would then at least have a chance to knock out a few medal contenders in the last 2-3 rounds.