Cuba maintains its good pace in the 44th World Chess Olympiad by drawing both sets of the Antillean squad before their rivals in turn in the third round of the tournament that is played in the city of Chennai, India, reports the Prensa Latina agency.
The men’s team tied 2-2 against Ukraine, with an outstanding performance by the top board of the national squad, GM Yasser Quesada (2568), who beat fellow GM Antón Korobov (2692) with black pieces, while Carlos Daniel Albornoz (2566) and Isan Ortiz (2526) agreed to a draw with white figures against Andréi Volokitin (2674) and Volodymyr Onyshchuk (2612) to solve the loss of Luis Ernesto Quesada in the third table against Kirill Shevchenko (2654).
For its part, the Cuban women’s team equalized with the same score against Australia thanks to the ties in the first two boards of Lisandra Ordaz (2367) against Julia Ryjanova (2284), and Maritza Arribas (2239) with Jilin Zhang (2212), the victory of the national champion Yaniela Forgas (2343) against Nguyen Mai Chi Phan (2139) while Ineymig Hernández (2234) lost to Thu Giang Nguyen (2119) on the fourth board.
For the fourth round of matches, the men’s team will face Hungary, an apparently more affordable rival than the Ukrainians, while the women will go up against the Swedish team, clearly a weaker rival than the Antillean team.
#ChessOlympiadRound 3 top results, Open section:
India A 3:1 Greece
Georgia 1:3 USA
Italy 3:1 Norway
Spain 3:1 Brazil
Australia 1½:2½ Poland
Azerbaijan 3:1 Argentina
Sweden 0:4 Netherlands
Ukraine 2:2 Cuba
Austria 2½:1½ Germany
England 2½:1½ Lithuaniahttps://t.co/pXOkvQnvWg pic.twitter.com/hHZHfPDkDb— International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) July 31, 2022
Before, the men’s squad had achieved resounding victories against weaker teams such as myanmar and Nigeria, a similar performance by the women’s team, which had just won categorically against Uganda and moldova previously.
On the other hand, the Cuban Leinier Domínguez, third board of the United States team, tied in his game of the date when his team faced Georgia, and for the moment he has two victories and one board in the competition.
In this edition of the World Chess Olympiad, the Swiss system of 11 rounds is played. Each team gets one point for a win, half a point for a draw, and zero for each loss. Each team earns two “match points” for winning a game, one point for a draw, and none for a loss.
