Wednesday 29 April 2015

China goes back to back

The win by the Chinese Team at the 2014 Chess Olympiad was a little bit of a surprise, although most pundits new that they would be Olympiad Champions at some point. But once they crossed that hurdle, it is far less of a surprise that the are the 2015 World Team Champions.
In the tournament which finished today, they score 15 Match Points to finish 3 points ahead of The Ukraine. In a tightly bunched finish, Armenia ended up third on 11, a pretty good comeback for a team that was only on 4 points with 4 rounds to play.
In terms of individual performances, Lev Aronion finished with the best score (6/9) on Board 1. The highest point scorer (and percentage) was Yi Wei of China, or scored 7/9 on Board 4.
China went through the event undefeated, scoring 6 wins and 3 draws. Most of their wins were of the 2.5-variety, but oddly their biggest victories  were over Armenia (3.5-0.5) and India (3-1). The other interesting thing about this event was that some teams doing OK at the half way point (Cuba, Israel, India) all seemed to crash in the second half, and finished towards the tail of the field.
Full details from the even can be found at the tournament website.

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