 |
 |
Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
|
|
|
|
|
|
© Dr Tim Harding
Last modified:
27 September 2026
The FIDE chess olympiads (Open and Women's) have ended in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, with the final round 11 played today. The Irish Open team finished with 12 match points and the Women with 13.
The Open team lost today to Canada 1.5-2.5. There was another win for Tom and a draw by Kavin on board 4 but the players with the Black pieces (Tarun and Adam) both lost.
By contrast, the Women's team won by the same scoreline. In that match, both our wins came with the Black pieces. Lara Putar's Albanian opponent blundered early and she had a quick win while Trisha Kanyamarala won a longer game. The decisive half point was scored on board 4 when Diana Mirza's opponent consented to a draw by repetition when she could have gone into an unbalanced, but winning, endgame.
This page next summarises the main winners and then discusses the overall Irish performance. You can also look at the official website for the event.
The detailed team and individual results can be seen on the chess-results website.
Yesterday saw the election as the new FIDE President of Kazakhstani entrepreneur Timur Turlov, who is probably little known in the West. He replaces the Russian politician Arkady Dvorkovich who served two terms of office. England's IM Malcolm Pein was the running mate of one of the candidates who was eliminated in the first round of voting.
The host country Uzbekistan made sure of winning the Open section with a round to spare, despite losing to Germany in round 8. In today's top matches they beat Ukraine 2.5-1.5 while India drew 2-2 with Hungary and Germany won 2.5-1.5 against the Netherlands. So Uzbekistan finished with 20MP while India took silver on tiebreak with 18MP and Germany took bronze. The USA was fourth on tiebreak, one of four teams with 17MP.
China won the Women's tournament with 20MP. Kazakhstan finished second on 18 and India had the best tie-break of the teams on 17MP so took bronze.
Firstly, it should be noticed that IM David Fitzsimons was originally selected and ICU announced him on the team back in May. He had qualified by winning the 2024 Irish Championship. We are unsure why he withdrew but presumably it was work-related and it created a vacancy for the new Irish champion FM Adam Collins who was the nominated reserve. We are unsure how much notice Adam had that he was going. Had David been able to play, our inoitial ranking would have been higher and perhaps the overall result might have been better.
Ireland's Open team had an initial seeding of 66 (out of 206 countries competing) and finished 65th so this can be viewed as a par result. Looking deeper, though, this was a disappointing outcome because no title norms were achieved and several results were unimpressive.
Two or three one-sided matches early in the tournament (one way or the other) are almost unavoidable because of the way olympiad pairings work. Then, in order to give the norm-seekers (chiefly our IMs on the top two boards in this case) the best chance of meeting sufficiently high opposition throughout the event, it is important not to have bad results in the middle rounds but that is exactly what happened to the team.
The record of match results was unimpressive. Ireland won five matches, drew two and lost four. The only good result against a higher-ranked team was the 2-2 draw in round 4 against Denmark who were initially seeded 25th and finished 39th.
All five wins and one of the drawn matches were against teams with an initial seeding and final position in the lower half of the tournament and none of which are known for their chess traditions. Additionally, one of the losses was to a lower-ranked team, though admittedly Hong Kong finished 29 places above their initial seeding (79th, improving on 108).
Between them those seven opposing teams had a total of zero GMs, 4 IMs and a few FMs in their squads. One of them had no IMs or FMs at all.
While the team did recover to score three straight wins from rounds 8-10, this was largely because of the easy pairings "earned" by dropping three match points to two lower-rated teams in rounds 6 and 7. While the loss in round 5 was to a somewhat higher-ranked country, they were on paper not as strong as the Danes we drew with the previous day.
The individual results of our Open team were (in board order) as follows:
1. IM Tarun Kanyamarala 5.5/9 (gaining about 10 FIDE rating points);
2. IM Tom O'Gorman 8/10 (+23.8);
3. GM Alex Baburin 5/7 (+2.6);
4. FM Adam Collins 3.5/9 (-42.2);
5 (reserve): FM Kavin Venkatesan 5/9 (-20.6).
So Tom was the outstanding performer on our two teams although he certainly rode his luck and saved at least one lost position. He clearly benefited from having Tarun do the heavy lifting on top board.
FM Conor O'Donnell captained the Open team and FM Jacob Flynn captained the Women's team.
Our comments in this article are not intended to be critical of any individual player, all of whom (bar GM Baburin) are young, and several are relatively inexperienced internationally.
Perhaps more criticism should be directed at the ICU for its selection methods and criteria. It is too late to change them for 2027 but they should all be rethought ahead of next year's agm.
It should be noted that some opposing teams had professional captains and perhaps this is an area where the Irish Chess Union needs to change its criteria for selecting captains. They need to invest money in order to achieve their goal of producing more players with higher FIDE titles. For example, Hong Kong (who beat Ireland despite being lower-ranked) had an Indian GM and chess author as their trainer.
Another thought is that if we wish to do better in future olympiads, we need to pick the players who are currently in form. Instead of the rule that every Irish champion (including from 2 years back) is automatically selected, instead we should hold the Irish championships around Easter time in olympiad years, and give that winner only a guaranteed place.
The Women's team did slightly better than the men, winning 6 matches, drawing 1 and losing 4 to finish 57th out of 189, more or less par as their initial seeding was 56.
They did not lose to any lower-ranked team and they impressively defeated Latvia in round 7, a higher-ranked nation. While their draw was with a somewhat lower ranked team, Iceland, that is certainly a country with a strong chess tradition, more so than Ireland in fact.
None of the female players had an individual result greatly out of line with expectations. They can all be reasonably satisfied with their performances though they probably hoped to do a bit better. The scores of our Women's team were (in board order) as follows:
1. WGM Trisha Kanyamarala 6.5.10 (-0.6);
2. Alice O'Gorman 4.5.9 (+14.2);
3. WFM Lara Putar 4/9 (+1.6);
4. WFM Diana Mirza 4.5.8 (+5.4)
5 (reserve): WCM Antonina Góra 4/8 (-9).
Back to the main Irish news page