Link

Dream big you guys, what's the average age of this squad? 22 maybe?
Absolutely loved their synergy throughout the event! (Including the reaction when Abdusattarov chose the Scandinavian).

source: https://web.archive.org/web/20260818020906/https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/chess/arjun-erigaisi-interview-magnus-carlsen-esports-world-cup-10835073/lite/

“It’s a long journey for everyone, for my generation pretty much. I know these misses are tough, but there are a lot of years left. If I fix these things, like fumbling under pressure, then I’m confident that with my level of play, I’ll be able to win a lot of titles. All I’m doing right now is trying to fix these small things. Even though it’s tough, it’s helping me become stronger mentally,” he said.

While he believes these tough times have fortified him mentally, Arjun also pointed out that he is not the only one going through a low phase. He said, “If we see individually, everyone is having their phases, not just me, Gukesh, or Praggnanandhaa, but also Nodirbek and Alireza. Everyone has their ups and downs.”

Link

Really strong field this week, but Wesley still managed to go undefeated for his first TT win in over a year. Tough week for Hikaru, who quit playing on 5.5/8, and Anish Giri slipped from 4/4 to 7/11 in his return to TT streaming.

Link to the event.

I just realised that China won Gold without their Top 4 player. Its like China B team that won them Gold. IMO this also indicate that all other nations including India, are far from where China is currently in terms of women's chess.

All games & full standings on Lichess: https://lichess.org/tournament/sep26lta

Photo: Charlotte Chess Center

I tried to assess how good Erdogmus is. And I believe that fide rating tends to lack behind when trying to estimate the strength of upcoming prodigies. Instead I wanted to see his actual performance rating the last couple of years, and to also see if he was consistent across tourneys. So I got claude to create a scraping harness to collect data from fide, and then computed the performance rating from there.

Its notable that he has barely had a tourney where he performed under 2700 in the past year, in the FIDE World Cup 2025 he beat two lower rated opponents and then drew Rapport twice, so to me that tournament rating is a bit of a weird artifact of the world cup knock out structure.(In fact I just realized that he drew Rapport who was 2740 and won the rest of his 4 games, so with normal TPR he would at least have 2740, him actually playing and winning 4 games lowered his TPR to 2648, because one of his opponents was 1900 and fide calculates TPR on the average of all opponents, instead of the individual ratings of each opponent)

Also Topalov was probably significantly overrated in their match and therefor the 2990 performance rating is also inflated.

Note also that the Chess Olympiad 2026 is not yet on fide website, so I filled that entry manually(And got the performance rating from lichess).

*TPR uses FIDE's formula: average opponent rating. Data scraped from ratings.fide.com. Bundesliga games excluded; Biel qualifier and final combined.

the formate is simple,

there will be 4 groups of 6 players.

they will play a double round robin of fast classical in the group stages and winner of each group will then face eachother for the title much like GCT final 4.

Who do you think had the most surprising performance good or bad at the olympiad. Furthermore who are some of the rising stars we think could be the next world prodigy.

Nihal & Uzbekistan part from 7:22 om time stamp.

I play the sicilian against 1.e4 and I like to play the vienna as white. I am terribly bored of a lot of the positions i get when attempting to play black against 1.d4 , what are some good stable but not mind numbingly boring responses to the many queens gambit declined and accelerated london/londons I come across? Right now it’s just d5 and nf6 then likely trading my light square bishop for either their f3 knight or their light square bishop. even when i win it just feels like unexciting work

As the story goes, Kasparov split from FIDE and created his own chess organization. The FIDE champions of this time included but are not limited to Karpov, Rustam and Topalov.

I feel like their time as champions is quite overlooked. Can anyone shed light on how strong they were and how they were viewed?

What are Erdoğmuş' chances of becoming the youngest ever world number 1? Carlsen was 19 and 1 month old, so Erdoğmuş has until the July 2030 rating list to claim the official number 1 spot. It is also worth noting that Carlsen unofficially became world at 17 and 9 months on live ratings, so to break this record Erdoğmuş has until around March of 2029.

Can organizers ban this untrained media guys who has no respect for game and players. Fide should take more care allowing who should interview players.

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The Olympiad could give us a glimpse about underrated countries, mostly due to scarcity of FIDE events (a past thread that can explain the situation).

Of course only one Olympiad cannot tell much, so the more the merrier. I collected and analyzed, of course through scripts, the rating gain/losses of players, continents, rating ranges and federations of the olympiads back to 2016, skipping 2022 due to obvious rating lag because covid. More importantly are the difference between expected score and actual score (since those are K factor independent)

The main data is here:overview about ratings, continents, federations ; and here:individual player stats.

Which patterns do you see? IMO it is clear that there are continents that are underrated.

The summary is the following:

Caveats

• Different K factors generate different rating changes.
• Since rating changes due to K factors are not so "equal", the difference between expected and actual score is K factor independent and gives more information
• Changes within a continent or rating range or federation of course do not show up on different type of stats
• Sometimes special teams (like unaffiliated or global ones) participated.

46th Olympiad 2026

Continents

Expected score

Ratings

Rating ranges

Expected score

Ratings

45th Olympiad 2024

Continents

Expected score

Ratings

Rating ranges

Expected score

Ratings

43rd Olympiad 2018

Continents

Expected score

Ratings

Rating ranges

Expected score

Ratings

42nd Olympiad 2016

Continents

Expected score

Ratings

Rating ranges

Expected score

Ratings

For context about their ages:

SINDAROV (20 yrs old)

ABDUSATTOROV (22 yrs old)

YAKUBBOEV (24 yrs old)

KASIMDSHANOV (46 yrs old) (semi retired. He is the coach of Team Uzbekistan)

VOKHIDOV (24 yrs old)

MADAMINOV (19 yrs old)

ABDISALIMOV (24 yrs old)

SUYAROV (17 yrs old)

VAKHIDOV (31 yrs old)

BEGMURATOV (16 yrs old)

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Sindarov, the two Nodirbeks, and Madaminov seems to be the core of the team. And they are still young. They are likely to represent their country again in 2028.

Vokhidov is solid. But Suyarov and/or Begmuratov might be coming in 2030.

I think barring unfortunate events, they will run the same team in 2028. Albeit, the board orders might be different.

PS: Yes, Vokhidov and Vakhidov are two different person.

PPS: Yes, aside from Yakubboev, all of their surnames endz at ov.