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Batumi Olympiad 2018 Round 6: The peaceful men, violent women

by Sagar Shah - 01/10/2018

The sixth round of the Batumi Olympiad 2018 saw some extremely exciting chess from both the men and women's team of India. While in the men's section we were able to hold Russia to a draw, in the women's section USA managed to survive after we had a 2-0 lead. Anand was struggling against Nepomniachtchi, but he drew the game, Adhiban was pressing against Jakovenko, but couldn't breakthrough. Tania and Humpy played excellent games, while Harika and Eesha got outplayed by their opponents. We have Harika's loss annotated by GM Surya Sekhar Ganguly who explains how Harika could have maintained the equality and given India a win.

Humpy played a fine game to beat IM Anna Zatonskih on top board | Photo: Niklesh Jain

Harika is a great positional player, but she met her match in Irina Krush | Photo: Amruta Mokal
Irina Krush shows her win over Harika and explains the ideas behind different moves

GM Surya Sekhar Ganguly analyzes Harika vs Krush:

Tania Sachdev played some excellent chess to beat her opponent Tatev Abrahamyan | Photo: Niklesh Jain

Eesha Karavade played not so well in the opening against Jennifer Yu, was a pawn down. She fought back and in the opposite coloured bishop endgame had some drawing chances but she couldn't hold the position
Coach of the Indian team Jacob Aagaard recaps the entire match

India vs Russia

Russia made an excellent move before the start of the game. The top board player Sergey Karjakin was rested. This is a luxury which only a team like theirs can afford. The main idea was that Anand didn't really have a great score against Nepomniachtchi. But because of this change, their top player Vladimir Kramnik had to accept the black pieces. Well, you cannot get everything! Russia's surprise move almost worked when Nepo had a great position against Vishy, but towards the end, he made some errors and the game was drawn. All other boards also ended in draws, with Adhiban having good chances to press against Jakovenko.

Adhiban was the man who pushed really hard but in the end could not break through

No, they were not playing each other! Vishy and Vlad are excellent friends of each other

Nepo, who was playing on the top board, had excellent support 

Vishy saved the day and that meant that Team India would not go down in the match

Andrey Filatov, the captain of Russian team took great care of the players by offering them home-made tea!

Vidit was surprised by Jakovenko in the opening, but he kept his cool and equalized without any difficulty.

Thus the match ended in a 2-2 draw. It might seem that with 9.0/12, India is lagging behind because there are teams on 12.0/12 at the event. However, I feel that we have done quite a big of hard work already by playing against the top two seeds of the tournament. In the seventh round, men's team play Egypt and the women's team is up against Georgia. It should be an easy outing for the men's team, but the women have their task cut out.


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