FIDE Online Olympiad: Division 3 In The Books
The 2021 FIDE Online Olympiad resumed over the weekend as the matches of Division 3 were played in five round-robin groups. Malaysia, Chinese Taipei, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Lebanon, Iraq, Scotland, Angola, Wales, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Jamaica qualified for Division 2, which takes place September 2-4 with 35 more seeded countries.
The Division 3 games of the FIDE Online Olympiad can be found on our live events platform: Pool A | Pool B | Pool C | Pool D | Pool E. On playing days, expert commentary is provided on Chess.com/TV starting at midnight Pacific / 9:00 a.m. Central Europe.
After the tournament opened last week with Division 4, the second Online Olympiad weekend is now in the books as well. With a new big batch of seeded teams thrown into the pools, each week the tournament is getting tougher. Consider that only two of the 16 Division 4 teams that qualified for Division 3 made it to Division 2: Lebanon and Angola.
Here's what happened last weekend in the five pools. (Note that all results remain provisional until all screenings for fair play have been finished.)
Live coverage of day three. Watch all of the live coverage at youtube.com/chess.
Pool A
The pool in the earliest time zones saw Malaysia take first place with 16/18. The team won eight matches and only lost to IPCA, a team consisting of physically disabled players. The other two qualifiers from this first pool were Chinese Taipei and Sri Lanka.
Top scorers in this group were WCM Chua Jia-Tien (8/8) and WFM Puteri Rifqah Fahada Azhar (8/9), both from Malaysia.
A top clash in this group was Chinese Taipei's IM Raymond Song vs. Malaysia's board one FM Lim Zhuo Ren. In a rather quiet position, White got the chance to break through on the queenside:
In round five, Nepal's Sindira Joshi found a nice checkmate vs. Chinese Taipei's WFM Shih Ching-An:
Pool B
This pool was dominated from start to finish by Ireland, which scored 17/18 match points, conceding just one draw against Jordan. The latter, however, failed to reach the top three places due to an upset loss to Kenya in round seven.
Second and third places were shared by Lebanon, a qualifier from Division 4, and Iraq.
Special mention goes to Cape Verde's board one, IM Mariano Ortega Amarelle (originally from Italy), who scored 9/9 that was more than the rest of his team together.
Pool C
Two teams were ahead of the rest in Pool C. Scotland won eight matches to secure victory with a round to spare and then, with a slightly weaker lineup, lost to the runner-up Angola, another qualifier from Division 4.
The fight for third place was tense, with Wales finishing on 12/18, just ahead of Zambia and Botswana with 11 points.
Scotland's IM Andrew Greet scored a nice attacking win in round five:
Pool D
In Pool D, Bolivia started with a 4-2 loss to Paraguay but then won its eight remaining matches. The team came in equal first with Uruguay, which won all its matches except against Bolivia. Paraguay edged out Trinidad and Tobago on tiebreak, a difference of five board points.
WIM Gabriela Vargas from Paraguay finished this weekend with a perfect 8/8 score. It must be noted that her strongest opponent was still 200 Elo points weaker. White's knight maneuver is nice, though:
Pool E
Even without GM Eduardo Iturrizaga, who made the federation switch to Spain (and won his first Spanish championship a few days ago), Venezuela was clearly the strongest in Pool E. As the only team this weekend, they finished on a perfect 18/18. El Salvador and Jamaica followed in second and third places.
Here's a win by Venezuela's WFM Corals Patino Garcia:
Watch these 15 qualifying teams and 35 new teams during September 2-4 in Division 2. There will be five pools of 10 teams each. All rounds will be live on chess.com/tv.
The FIDE Online Olympiad is a major online chess event for national teams that runs August 20-September 15 on the Chess.com server. More than 1,000 participants and 153 teams from all over the world are playing.
Each team consists of six players, including at least two women, at least one player who is 20 or younger, and at least one female player who is 20 or younger. The time control for all matches is 15 minutes for the game and five seconds increment per move, starting from move one.
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Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
Peter's first book The Chess Revolution is out now!
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