The Week in Chess

The 41st FIDE Chess Olympiad in Tromso is as yet in the early stages but already there are signs it will be very hard going for the leading players as everyone seems so very well prepared.

Magnus Carlsen made his first appearance with black against Tomi Nyback. Carlsen more or less equalised out of the opening but there was nothing more and he and his Norwegian first team colleagues all drew. Carlsen in fact lost to Nyback in their last game together in the Olympiad Dresden 2008 and seems never to have beaten him. The Norwegian second team also drew their match but this time against the might of Ukraine. Vassily Ivanchuk tried very hard to sharpen things against Frode Urkedal completely overdid it and went down to a horrible loss.

In such a huge event there will inevitably be a huge amount of interesting games. I've been working on my own version of the games and checks. To be honest the FIDE team have done an excellent job so far and I don't expect the official version to have too many problems. I've slightly changed the way the round numbers appear and hopefully produced a good checking system for incorrect results. Now I can start to follow the games a bit more.

Judit Polgar is on board four and her job is to score heavily for Hungary. She certainly played a very interesting game in winning today which caught my eye.

There were three individual defaults due to the zero tolerance rule in round 2 including one of an 11 year old and one of veteran Alexander Beliavsky. At least one team fell foul of the rule too.

Olympiad Open Round 3 Monday: ARM-FRA, USA-NED, NOR-MNE, GER-ENG, POL-CUB, ITA-IND, TUR-GEO, ISL-SRB, SUI-VIE, MKD-RUS, HUN-CHN, AZE-CRO, BLR-ISR, CZE-IRI, BUL-ESP etc