The 2014 Chess Olympiad starts in a few hours. For the first round the start time is 3pm Norway time (11pm Canberra time), but for the rest of the rounds (except the last round) it will be a 2pm start.
The first round is normally the chance for the higher seeded teams to give the lower seeded ones a good kicking, but sometimes upsets do occur. For the Papua New Guinea team, Singapore is a tough opponent in round 1, but there might be a chance of something. Australia probably has it easier with the US Virgin Islands there first up opponents, but Australia has not always 4-0 the first round (the other Virgin islands scored a first round point against Australia in 2004 iirc). In the Women's section Australia is playing Kenya, who I know very little about (as a chess team). Obviously 4-0 result would be the goal here, to get everyone off to a good start.
I also attended the captains meeting this morning, and there were a couple of important things to note. Despite 0 default time being removed from the Laws of Chess it will be in effect for the Olympiad. Also no draw agreements in under 30 moves is in effect. Captains are restricted in how they interact with players, and how they can deal with draw offers etc.
The place to catch all the action is www.chess24.com and click on the Olympiad tab. Assuming the last minutes fixes I saw being applied don't bugger anything up, all games should be live.
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3 comments:
so, your prediction about 4:0 was right
The chess24 site is impressive, although it crashed a few times last night. Does the Olympiad really have over a thousand of those internet-linked chess boards available?
Yep. Every game has a dgt board wired up. They generally do it in the same way as it is done in Australia, but clearly they have better quality gaf tape.
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