happy september everybody in this video i'm going to try to break down a full month of chess action
and drama at the end of it in about 15 minutes the fide online chess olympiad took place from
july 25th to august 30th if you haven't caught up on your chess news india and russia had a really
strange conclusion to the whole thing and you can use the timeline in the video player to just jump
ahead to me covering games from the final and the drama that took place but if you want to watch
the entire story unfold please do so i'm going to be talking through the entirety of it and showing
you various graphics so let's get started this beautiful graphic just talks about the
information it was a tournament that lasted over 30 days which is pretty wild that is kind of rare
in chess and this is the format which you don't have to read a lot into but it was 163
teams now the interesting thing is the olympiad is usually four players competing this one was
six and required uh the countries to feature uh their female players as well as a a boy and
a girl who were under 20 years old so some really strong junior players to give him a chance to play
then we had things called divisions now what does that mean so we start out in the base division
the base division is the bottom 30 teams in the olympia that took place in 2018
and you split those 30 teams into three pools of ten okay so 10 10 10 they all play against each
other round robin and the top four teams so four times three is 12 move up and play into division
four and division four features those 12 teams and 38 teams that ranked above those teams
in 2018 so you just basically move up right you keep moving up and moving up
so division four is split now into five pools of ten and three top teams continue their climb up
lebanon was a country that made it through two divisions and ultimately what this results in is
uh division three and the same process is redone for division three and then we have division two
more familiar countries like germany and spain and italy begin to enter the mix
uh and ultimately you end up in the top division so 15 teams come from division two
up into the top division and the top division has five top finishers from the
concluded olympiad in 2018 so russia china usa ukraine and india the top five
and the countries chosen uh from the four continents so armenia azerbaijan poland georgia
mongolia right so different continents selecting five powerhouse chess teams like peru canada and
so on on your screen uh and then these teams end up competing to qualify for a 12 player playoff
12 team playoff 12 player playoff however you want to call it now if you are at the top of those
groups you auto qualify to the quarterfinal okay and the other eight compete amongst themselves
to see who seeds against you in the quarterfinals you can go game by game and an extremely useful
resource to keep in mind for all of this it's something i'm about to show you uh fide created an
incredible website for this check this out so this is the official fide website uh obviously link it
in the description and probably pin a comment as well you have the entire schedule you have all the
teams that made it and at the same time you also have the archive of what took place so you can
look division by division of who competed and who did well across what pools see india azerbaijan
russia and the united states won their respective pools so they qualified for the quarterfinals
and if we back up we see what happened in the quarterfinals so greece lost to armenia two to
zero uh poland defeated bulgaria two to zero so six games followed by six games uh obviously it's
six players per team right uh germany and hungary competed and germany uh actually lost to hungary
in an armageddon right so in an armageddon one to zero uh china ukraine maybe in surprising fashion
ukraine actually was the winner now the first bit of drama came in this quarterfinal matchup up here
between india and armenia and basically what happened in that matchup was the fact that
uh the the the the indian team uh nihal sarin very strong player was playing hayek martirosian and
what happened was hayek disconnected okay so hayek disconnected in what more or less was a drawn end
game and they lost the match they lost three and a half two and a half and india took a one-nothing
lead uh armenia appealed to the international chess federation and their appeal was turned down
they although they tried to prove that there was a disconnect of some sort no official statement
has been made one is coming from fidenchus.com and all these things and so armenia decided
not to play the second match at all they just forfeited and india moved on to the semi-finals
azerbaijan versus poland it was actually poland victorious russia hungary russia and usa defeated
ukraine which then brings me to the semi-finals in the semi-finals nothing too complicated occurred
uh india defeated poland india actually came back after losing four to two against poland in the
first game and winning the armageddon and russia and usa russia just won in convincing fashion
which brings us to the final and in the final we had india versus russia an incredibly strong
matchup if we click on this it allows you to look at who was going up against who bid it
hare krishna connor hampi uh haruka dranovalli prague and as as well as uh divya deschamps who
is a 14 year old superstar and if you look across the other side they're equally stacked right
so in their first leg all the games were drawn all of the chess drama begins right around now
in the second wave of games nepo versus vichy was a draw do above vidit was a draw garage keno won
against conor rouhami and they were up by a game it was two and a half one and a half it
was at this moment that the these two boards nihal sarin and divya deshmukh disconnected
and because of this india lost on two boards and filed an appeal and so the difference
between india's disconnection and the armenian disconnection as i understand it and it has been
relatively public but a little bit confusing was the fact that uh there was a cloud flare problem
there was a global outage and this went to fide it was ruled a different situation than the armenian
situation and the feed a president arkady vorkovich made a statement which i will also
link in the description uh and he basically said both teams will be ruled winners of the olympiad
and personally i don't think that this is the right decision at all uh i won't mince words many
many russian fans were unhappy they said how can you win an olympiad without winning a single game
but at the same time people were saying well uh paulina chuvalva playing against divya was
busted she was completely lost at the time of the disconnect uh divya would have went on to
win that game we have an even match right then you look at the yasipanko sarin position etc but
they were saying well india was going to win that game if not for the disconnection people saying
okay i'm going to make it very clear i don't think that you should just award two winners
uh you should maybe reschedule the matches for another day i mean the first match
was totally even maybe you start with a handicap one to zero on a certain board but people wouldn't
be happy with that either because divia was in a winning position all the same so but i
still think it's better than just making this sweeping claim that there can be two gold medals
i don't know what the right decision is i think that you should let me know what
the right decision is let me know in the comments whether you're a fan from india russia or just the
spectator watching from anywhere in the world at this point i will look at some of the games played
in the final and then we will talk about just what this means for online chess moving forward
uh there was a super fascinating game between vidid and and jan and agad mator antonio he he
already covered uh this game uh but i will kind of breeze through it it was another
grunfeld defense from jan this was in round one of the final we got a super complicated d5
b5 line from nepo which he's been playing a lot he's been playing it in these online tours
bishop takes c5 rook c8 upon sacrifice the most exciting moment of this game comes
right around in the in almost close to move 30 where it looks like uh jan's pieces are all set
up but there's about to be a castles here and it's going to be completely safe and he detonates rook
takes f2 on vid it and forces vidit to bring his king directly into a double check and i'm
not covering the intricacies of the variations it's already kind of a long video uh and antonio
already did a great job so shout out to him but uh what ultimately ended up happening is that he had
to leave his king in the center and despite being a full rook up vidit basically had to repeat moves
and if we look we take stock he's a full rook up but he never moved his h1 rook this entire game so
a fascinating groomfield between vidit uh and nepo which results in in repetition and the spicy games
come from the match-up between garagecana and hampi kanero from the second wave of games uh
this was a queen's gambit declined i just made a video on this if you haven't seen it already
a very solid queen's gambit declined with this pawn structure and gariatchkina plays in brilliant
fashion first she strikes in the center and creates a pass pawn which then is supported by her
pieces she brings the pawn to a very nice square and plays knight g5 threatening mate which forces
humpty to make this trade bishop for night and now the bishop can always come in here and defend the
pawn and from here on out garage kind of brought her rooks to the center of the board traded the
bishop for the night and proceeded to create weaknesses on the queen side by moving her apon a
fantastic game of chess all while creating a loft for the king to not get back ranked and to put
two rooks in support of this pawn so she plays in the center on the right side and on the left side
as you see absolutely brilliant play uh and there you have it creating this weakness breaking up the
structure and winning a long long long end game with the queen and the two rooks first she won
a pawn and basically invested full time into d7 then she won a second pawn which humpty sacrificed
but created an unbreakable barrier and slowly slowly improved her position also utilizing the
clock stabilizing pressuring and found a way in low time to finally around here play the very
important move f6 sacrificing a pawn but allowing the king in and there you go she breaks through
the defense and finally is able to destroy all the remaining pawns and get a rook trade
and that secures the victory zombies rook did not move for the entire half of the second uh the
entire second half of the game i should say uh and it was uh goriachena who won and that brings me
to the game between divia uh and paulino chevallov and paulinus chiralva is the world junior champion
this was a king's indian uh attack setup and polina played relatively standard fashion bishop
e7 bishop b7 b5 prevents c4 early on and here we just saw expert play if you're looking for
a closed attacking weapon as an intermediary and an advanced player look no further than the king's
indian attack where you lock up the center and then play h4 rotate in the knight h5 h6 and so on
you shut down your opponent's play on the queen side and watch as she methodically
starts transferring all her pieces to i the king then she plays d4 locking the center even more
and reroutes her bishop look at this climb right the bishop crawl not the climb to c2 king g2
rook h1 and it was here after 10 meticulous improving moves that divia disconnected and
people were saying look she's got one two three four five six seven eight m's in her bank account
five pieces lined up directly at polina's king of course she's gonna win this game
you plug it into any engine it's already saying plus three it's completely lost
her next move was going to be knight to e3 get this night out g4 g5 bring the second rook
and she very well might have won this game but the story ends right here the disconnect happened
and after deliberation the fide president despite being russian by by nationality ruled actually in
favor of india some might say because india was down a game ultimately at the time and this game
is not done i mean it's there's a lot of pieces on the board divya definitely has a better position
and is most likely going to go on to win but things can happen especially as time gets lower
i did say this was going to be a 15 minute recap right well we're basically there
hopefully this sums up an entire month of chess for you the feed hs olympiad was an
incredible spectacle and it sucks that it had to end on a sour note positive for some chess
fans but in my opinion you don't award two gold medals you look for a competitive stand to it uh
kostanyuk nepo levon aronian so many people tweeting around the world twitter was a whirlwind
what do you think let me know in the comments and if you're going to debate with somebody be nice
don't be toxic don't be disgusting and if you just adamantly disagree with somebody's comment
just don't write something nasty just back away take a second breathe but i want to open up the
conversation to all of you hopefully you enjoyed this video even though normally i obviously do
focus a lot more on chess and that's all for now i'll catch you in another video tomorrow