Kyiv: The Chess Olympiad in Batumi, Georgia, ended the other day, with the election of a new FIDE President. The respectable, but close to Putin Arkady Dvorkovich replaced the odious Kirsan. However, readers are probably not interested in intrigues around chess, but in the actual results of international competitions.
The chess commentator Dmitry Nagorny, well-known in Ukraine, decided to share them with the readers of our agency in an exclusive material.
If chess were part of the Olympic Games, then the wise would play ten sets of awards. But this is a great game with its Olympics and every two years, the strongest countries in the world send their national teams on this prestigious competition in the chess kingdom.
True, there are nearly 200 teams missing, and those that do not represent the country and are not subject to international law. For example, England, in football, says that it has such a privilege because it has invented the game of millions. But the game of the wise was not invented in Foggy Albion ...
Also, some artificially created teams of people with different health disorders are playing. It's great that such people can compete so much, but for this, there must be separate tournaments, not the Olympics. And the owners put up six of their teams. At the Olympiad, which only ended in Georgia, their first team won the second, which slowed down the others, making them win bronze medals. And could converge in the last round ...
In addition, the “Swiss system” blindly selects pairs of teams, where there are so many different teams in the same point group. After all, in 11 rounds, 185 teams do not have time to resort and such wonders happen. And in the Olympics there is no masculine tournament - there is a common game where men and women can play together and there is a purely female one. Here such miracles happen. And not metal detectors, but mine detectors jamming everything and everyone in and around the playing hall are to avoid computer prompts. They even came up with the word cheating, who does it. So knowing all this and more, the delegates of the IOC do not even want to consider that chess should fall into the program of the Olympic Games.
Nevertheless, such competitions are interesting, the chess world lives by this. Only the Olympics ends. Our team in the general group, despite the fact that it avoided meeting with the main favorites - the USA, the Russian Federation and Armenia, it was only in tenth place. That success for football, for our chess, is a failure. Well, almost ... After all, we went to the Olympics in the status of the most chess playing nation in the world, possessing the Nona Gaprindashvili Cup for victory in terms of the sum of the achievements of two teams - men's team and women's team.
The fate of gold awards for women was decided at the final round, in a dramatic, piquant situation, when Russians won and could help us win gold awards during the match with China. But there were such incredible miracles that ...
And in terms of equality of team achievements, the fate of the “gold” was decided in other matches. This is when rivals with whom China played performed better than those who played with us. Such a command factor. We are "silver". But they did not remain without the gold award of Ukraine - on the second board the ex-world champion, the magic woman Marichka Muzychuk from Lviv brought us to triumph! Miracles continued even further - the USA, the Russian Federation, Armenia and other chess grants were left without gold awards. But there were treasured gold awards in Congo, Seychelles, Syria, Jordan, Georgia -3 and even in Scotland, which formally is not a separate country.
Dmitry Nagorny