Istanbul Olympic Report

Late Thursday. November 9

The Estonian Team was without Ehlvest today: apparently the player who played Alex needed to play against a strong GM to get his gm norm. Alex played a very strange game: he put his knight off side and in great risk of being trapped! His opponent took it and Alex got two powerful pawns in the centre. He missed a very strong d6 pawn move that would probably have won. Instead, Alex allowed himself to get outplayed in time trouble and went down for the only time in the Olympiad.

I played black in an isolated queen pawn game and scored a neat win when my opponent over extended on the kingside with g4.

Pascal played a beautiful game today and smashed his Estonian counterpart. His game was the first to finish. Apparently Pascal now has an IM norm in the bag:congrats!!

David chose a complicated and somewhat risky continuation (...d5) to make a draw. His opponent was somewhat thrown off with the ease with which he did so.

So now we have 27 points! I can not remember another time when I was playing when we had achieved so many points against such strong opposition.

Tomorrow we play the powerful Uzbekhastan team. With two rounds to go I am very pleased with the dedication and discipline exhibited by all of the members of the Canadian Team. I remember once seeing Alex in bed by 11:30 in the evening.

I remarked to him that I was very impressed with his professionalism by going to bed relatively early (in anticipation of the next day's tough adversary). Alex remarked that it had nothing to do with that: he was simply exhausted!!

Supper today was, according to different eye-witnesses, a lot more awful than it looked. It consisted of some beef (we are not 100% sure) and vegetables covered by a heavy goat cheese cream. Maybe part of the goat was included.

More tomorrow.