Friday 14 November 2008

Olympiad Day 1


The big day has finally arrived, with almost a thousand players moving into the playing hall for the first round of the 2008 Olympiad. There was much interest in the start of the first round as FIDE has introduced a rule that players absent at the start of the round will lose. Although almost all teams managed to front up on time there was a bizarre result in the Moldova v Morocco match where Morocco failed to show but Moldova only scored 3 points after their board 1 went missing as well.
As for the chess, the Olympiad is using accelerated pairings which meant that instead of being massacred 4-0 by Indonesia, Papua New Guinea would probably score the same result against Uruguay. As it turned out the acceleration helped us a little bit as I managed to draw on board 2, limiting our defeat to 3.5-0.5 Despite the margin, we fought hard on all boards, with the top 3 boards heading into the 4th hour of the game before the result became clear.
As you can see in the photo, at least 3 of the team were taking the match seriously, although my distant stare can be explained by a desire not to cough all over my opponent and give him the sore throat I have been suffering from. (Many thanks to Cathy Rogers for providing the photo)
At the moment I am still hamstrung by the internet facilities at hotel, but hopefully these will be sorted out quickly, and I will be able to provide games and extended commentary.

4 comments:

Nick Beare said...

Hi Shaun,

Saw your game against Carvalho on a link from chessworld.net??? Well played!

Good luck over there,
Nick B

Phil Bourke said...

Bad luck on the team result, congrats on the individual result. You played well, keep up the good work and we'll have to claim you as an Aussie :)

Unknown said...

Shaun,

I put your game on OzChess with our new chess viewer.

http://www.ozchess.com.au/games-chess-olympiad-2008/840-games-dresden.html#post10531

I wanted your permission before I added annotations. Looks like you were flogging the poor chap. Don't waste all your good moves in the first round because there are still 10 games left :)

Alex

Shaun Press said...

Feel free to annotate, although I don't think I was flogging. I just wanted to keep the game even, although towards the end I was slightly better (maybe h4 and g5 with ideas if playing my queen down the f file).