The Week in Chess

The games for Rounds 1 and 2 are now up. Men's Games in PGN and Women's Games in PGN contain the games from the first two rounds. I've done a lot of work on a new method of outputting games and there will be improvements throughout the Olympiad. Almost certainly this will be the last round these files aren't zipped. The idea is to upload games to a database and to dynamically update the results as the rounds progress. Hopefully from tomorrow I can start reporting on the actual play. Comments on the new experimental format of PGN are welcome as are any corrections. I did arrive at an insight that a pair of tags for the White and Black FIDE Code for the players would have made the TWIC archive of games hugely more useful.

Although it has to be said that the bulletins for the official site at the end of play seem quite good with a correction made I knew about (I quibble with some naming conventions, that will be the next thing to change and there seem to be some games from the first 5 or 6 matches of the women's section from round 1 which I have added).

The major story seemed to be that the Yemeni team was returning home after being drawn against Israel. They didn't turn up for their Round 1 match against Isreal and played round 2 against Cameroon. Last night it seemed they had been ordered home by their Government but they turned up to play Brazil in Round 3. So the Yemen Government seems to have been reacting to seeing moves on the board in the live coverage which turned out to be from England's match. Aviv Bushinsky, chairman of the Israel Chess Federation is reported to be sending letter to the world chess governing body demanding the Yemen team be disqualified from the competition because it decided to "play politics instead of chess."