It was a very busy period for me, with some quality training sessions, and of course tournament in Denmark took lion´s part of my focus.
Today, I want to continue the series of articles about improvement in chess.
As I promised last time, the subject of this article will be strategy and understanding (and an endgame comes in the next article)
The main difference between this article and previous two articles will be that this article can be used directly into training practice (but it will contain no real exercises).
A position on the diagram looks like an easy winning for White, and it seems that there is no need to explain something there, but we will see a little later in the text what is going on.
I should first talk about results and performances in the tournament, but as I wrote before the event this was not the primary thing for me in this tournament.
I could not imagine that my planed primary thing and was what really going on were two completely different things.
More about that later in the text.
I finished on the very good 4-14 place (when I was rated number 15) with very good score of 6 out of 9 points.
Feels good?
I will start this rapport with nice position which can be used as positional exercise.
A task is to find most promising continuation for Black.
As one member of our delegation, IM Daniel Semcesen (recently interviewed on this blog) noticed, White defended himself against one threat all the time but the threat has more dimensions.
This position was from my game from round number four, against promising young boy from Denmark, Martin Percivaldi (born 1999, Elo 2041).
I am most satisfied with this game in the first half of the tournament.
I didn´t wrote articles on the blog since the Olympiad finished and I thought that it can be good idea to inform the readers about what is going on in my chess activities.
Tomorrow starts one open tournament in Denmark (in Borup, to be more precise) and I will take part in it.
It is in the beginning of my long training period and I was quite unsure would I play or not.
Still, playing conditions are quite good (I mean, even for IMs) and playing venue is also quite nice.
I need to say that I am really impressed how things works in chess in Denmark and I criticised Swedish chess organisers for not doing the same, and was ready to do it again in this text, when I got a quite interesting mail from one of Swedish organisers.
The last round in 40th Chess Olympiad was finished. The gold took Armenia with a minimal victory against Hungary, while Russians won against Germany with 3-1 but took only the silver medal. China lost 3-1 to Ukraine which took bronze.
Swedes crashed Brasil by 3-1 and finished in the top 20, while Bosnians had the worst day during the Olympiad and lost against approximately equal rated Bangladesh with 2,5-1,5.
A pleasant surprise came from Denmark, and they will also finish in the top 20 after superb victory against Georgia with 3-1.
Today´s round is almost finished (there some more games unfinished but nothing serious will change), and it is still completely open question who will win the Olympiad.
We could see that USA won against Russia yesterday, bringing everybody (expect Russians) very exciting finish.
Today, they lost to China who is now in the lead, together with Russia and Armenia who won against Netherlands.
As all three teams played against each-other they will get some easier opponents tomorrow.
I don´t know what is the first tie-break but it seems that it is number of game-point won by opponents which I will explain later in the text. This was also one more successful day for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sweden. Bosnians played against higher rated Austria, and had all chances to win this match, but are probably satisfied with 2-2.
Swedes won against lower rated Canada with a minimal possible margin and you can guess who was their match winner.
Observing from a point of view of Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina, today´s round was probably the best one in the whole Olympiad (combined).
Bosnians played against Finland which is rated just 2 places bellow Bosnian team, but I am not sure who had higher rating in this match, because we played with reserve player.
And our reserve player is our best scorer so far, and it will stay to the end of Olympiad.
Sweden won against Mongolia, with convincing 3-1 victory.
A very little positive can be said for today´s round.
Results of Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina were opposite again and we could see Sweden winning 3-1 while Bosnians lost 1-3. But why than there are little positive things today? Well, to not win against Nigeria with 4-0 is not satisfactory at all.
We are already in the second part of Chess Olympiad in Istanbul and today´s round was quite interesting.
Bosnian team, not so good rated (place 50) continued with surprisingly good results, this time against very strong team of Czech Republic (rated 17th).
It was just due to luck that Czech Republic saved a draw and match finished with peaceful result of 2-2.
On the other hand, Swedes disappointed again. After two victories in a row, Sweden got Slovenia which was a good opponent to play against (rated 28th, compared with 34th which is Sweden´s starting place). Slovenia won with 3,5-0,5.
This was a round with opposite results for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sweden.
As Sweden took his chance and won convincingly against Scotland, Bosnian team lost against much higher rated China.
Besides that, the Olympiad is approaching culmination point as the main favourites for gold are playing against each-other.
Today was a very good day for teams in yellow and blue.
Bosnia and Herzegovina won with high score 3-1 against Qatar and moved on shared 5-21 place.
Sweden won against Andorra with 3,5-0,5 and soon it will be fight for higher positions again.
There were some very interesting results for teams from former Yugoslavia.
Croatian team won against France with 2,5-1,5 and moved on shared 3-4 place !
Montenegro played 2-2 against European Champion, Germany and they share place with Bosnian team.
Russia and Armenia won against Hungary respectively Ukraine and moved on top.
