World Youth Olympiad Round 6+7: There's no stopping Russia, India green heading for Silver

Round 6: Russia crushes Iran

16th of December 2017 was a double round day at the World Youth Olympiad 2017. Rounds six and seven were played. After Round five Russia was on a perfect score of 10.0/10, with rest of the teams being two points away from them. Russia's final test came in the form of Iran in the sixth round. I call it the 'final test' because they had already played India before and some other strong teams like Uzbekistan.

Russia vs Iran

If Iran had to win this match, then all their boards had to fire. The first problem occurred when Amin Tabatabaei who played the Dragon repeated the position thrice with the black pieces, and later was clearly unhappy with the result.

On board two Alireza Foruzja seemed to have continued from where he left (5.0/5), as won a pawn against his opponent Sergei Lobanov.

Although Black was a pawn down, Lobanov did not feel that his position was so bad. He fought on and Alireza got into tremendous time pressure. When the young Iranian made an uncharacteristic mistake, Lobanov took his chance and launched a mating attack.

After the game, I caught hold of Lobanov, who is surely having one of the finest tournaments of his life. Not only did he beat Alireza, but he also got the better of Praggnanandhaa a few rounds ago. Beat two huge talents in one tournament means that you yourself are a special talent. Check out his analysis of his game against Firouzja.

Board three between Gaifullin and Aryan Gholami ended in a draw and board four between Fakhrutdinov and Mahdi Gholami was a victory for the Russia team. The final scoreline of the match was 3.0-1.0 in the favour of Russia.

India green vs India red

Another match-up that everyone was looking forward to was the India green versus India red. It's true that the green team has all the stars (Pragg, Nihal, Aryan) but the red team had shown consistent performance. Also players like Rajdeep Sarkar, Jayakumaar, Arjun Ergiasi and Mitrabha Guha are pretty strong players. They usually do not give in so easily! However, the green team proved that having a rating edge mattered as they beat the red team with a score of 3.5-0.5. Quite a curious decision by the team was to rest one of their strongest players on board four Mitrabha Guha. This created quite some confusion for Iniyan who had prepared against Guha and had to face Harshita Guddanti.

Aryan Chopra who has been in pretty dismal form in this event, showed some excellent bit of chess to beat Rajdeep on the top board. This game is a model example of how Black should not play against the Scotch.

The move Nge7 was a bad move by Rajdeep in the opening. It seems pretty natural as you want to castle and quickly play f5, but the resulting structure favours White greatly. Hence, it was important for Black to develop his knight to f6. Such errors are quite uncommon at such a high level, but it also shows how a natural move in the opening can give you a bad position after which there is nothing much left to fight for.

Results of round 6

Round 7: Russia unstoppable, India on second place

Lobanov and Obolentseva made quick draws on boards one and four respectively. On boards two and three Gaifullin and Fakhrutdinov provided the Russians two victories. Thus Russia managed to beat Turkey with a solid 3:1 scoreline.

Nihal was rested for the encounter and Vaishali played her third game of the tournament, which is the minimum required number of games from the girl player. While the boards two, three and four fired, it was Aryan Chopra on the top board who lost his way against Viacheslau Zarubitski.

Praggnanandhaa's positional win against Olga Badelka was quite nice. But even better was the way he conducted himself after the victory. We have captured Pragg's reaction in the video below after his win over Badelka and also his loss to Alireza. Nothing much changes in Pragg's expressions because of the result of the game. And this is quite refreshing from the normal tantrums that young kids throw up after losing their game.

Surprisng was the result on board four where Mitrabha Guha had a 300 point advantage of his opponent. However, the most interesting game was definitely on board where where Amin Tabatabaei played a beautiful game of chess that was crowned by a stunning finale.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you spotted the mating combination beginning with Rxh7!! Kxh7 Rh1+ Kg8 Bh6

Results of round 7

Rankings after round 7:

With two rounds to go it seems highly unlikely that any team can bridge the three point gap that Russia has over the other teams. With the gold deservedly going to Russia, it's going to be a tough fight for the silver.

Pictorial impressions by Amruta Mokal:

To end this article we would like to show you a very interesting interview of 84-year-old S.C. Subramanium who has been playing chess for 60 years now. What does he have to think about Fischer's "Chess is Life" quote? Bekaar (Useless)!!