Thursday 12 September 2024

2024 Chess Olympiad - Day 0.5

 I normally make these posts at the end of the day (after the round) or the following morning. However, while there is a bit of lull, I thought I would sneak in a quick report about start of the first report.

As with all Olympiads, the first round does throw up some interesting challenges. The main one is making sure all the teams are present, so the round can start on time. Also normal is that the first round *never* starts on time. In this case the round did start a little late, in part due to transport issue for a few teams. Nonetheless the round only began 20 minutes late, with the exception of a few games, which started a bit later.

One thing the organisers did do well is to handle the large crowd of players trying to enter the playing hall. I have seen some absolute chaos at previous Olympiads, with queues well out the door, but this wasn't the case this time. I did have some issues finding some teams we needed to deal with (in terms of pairings), but overall it was a smooth start.

On bizarre occurrence was one team staging a boycott as their flag was printed incorrectly. The solution involved an arbiter drawing the missing colours on the player cards (with a texta), which satisfied the team concerned.


No comments: