Tuesday 21 September 2010

2010 Olympiad - Day 0

A very hectic day yesterday. The morning was quite relaxing with a shopping trip into town. Checked out the local supermarket, and picked up some of the neccesities of life. In the afternoon Brian Jones and I walked between the Hotel Olympica and the venue, which was a good 40 minutes.
In the evening there was a captains meeting where a number of important rule changes were discussed. But rather than clog up this blog with what is essentially dull technical information, I will stick that sort of stuff in Chess Rules blog.
After that was an opening ceremony which I saw little of, although you can catch the highlights over at Chessvibes. Following that the Technical Administration Panel got down the job of pairing the first round before distributing this important information around 1 in the morning!
At the moment players are submitting their player lists or the first round, which as you would expect is like the start of any first round of a tournament. At some point I will be able to eat breakfast/do prep/ catch some sleep but I've no idea when.
As for the chess, PNG get Iran in the first round, which on one level isn't a bad pairing. Not that they are not heavy favorites, but we did play them in the first round of the 2000 Olympiad, so they are familiar to us. Action should kick off at 7pm Canberra time.

4 comments:

HeinzK said...

http://heinzk.blogspot.com/2010/03/igm-scalp.html

Iran's board 2 down in less than 20 moves, you can do that too:p

Anonymous said...

I found this older post of yours on the steinitz gambit puzzle by sam loyd. I did not understand the solution. i left a comment htere but i doubt you'd see it as it's a fairly old post. how does moving the king and letting the black get a queen get white a mate in 3? I was scouring the internet for a proper explanation and am desperate now!!

http://chessexpress.blogspot.com/2009/08/steinitz-gambit.html

Anonymous said...

Are there any mullahs on the Iranian team ? LOL

Mario said...

http://livechess.chessdom.com/site/
has live coverage of all the top players with stockfish analysis, http://ugra-chess.com/results.php has live coverage of all the games, including what is (so far!) a very promising game by Shaun against an Iranian GM in match 38 board 2...
Good Luck Shaun! :D
Mario