Wednesday 27 July 2011

Armenian Team Work

The Armenian Team has won the 2011 World Teams Championship, proving once again that they are masters of teams chess. Although ranked 4th by seeding, they finished with 14/18 (match points scoring), winning 5 matches and drawing 4. This put them 1 point ahead of the host country China, who won 6 matches, but lost 2. Ukraine finished 3rd, with top seeds Russia once again coming up short in a teams event by finishing in a 3 way tie for 4th.
Unlike the Olympiad, this event is an all play all, so there is nowhere to rest after a bad result. Armenia used a similar strategy to their 2 Olympiad winning teams by playing their top 4 for almost all their games (Aronian rested once to give their board 5 his only game). Most other teams rotated players, although the majority of board 1 players played all 9 games.
Apart from Russia, Israel's 9th place was also a surprise, as they normally do well at Olympiads. Less of a surprise was Egypt finishing 10th, as they were rated 100 points below the next team.

1 comment:

Paul said...

1 e4,e5 2 Nf3,Bc5 3 Nxe5, Nc6 4 Nf3, d5 5 exd5, Qxd5 6 Nc3, Qh5 (+0.96) - Shredder