Batumi Chess Olympiad 2018 Round Two Press Report
I woke up this morning could not remember where I was.
Thought I might be in Virginia because I had been thinking about my court case there.
Finally I worked back how I had gotten here.
After several minutes of thought I figured out that I was in the Republic of Georgia.
The first round of the Olympiad with top against bottom resulted in 4-0 wipeouts in most of the matches.
However, just about the only team that did not achieve this was the USA Woman's team with Foisor Sabina-Francesca losing to a player from rated 500 points below her from Uruguay.
Now in Round Two the USA men suffered a near defeat with the USA Men barely beating the Georgia Three team 2.5 to 1.5.
Being the host country in the Olympiad, Georgia gets to field one extra team and if there are an odd number of teams it gets two extra teams so this year Georgia has three teams in the Olympiad.
The Congo team showed up late.
It was the Georgia-3 team that came close to defeating the USA.
More sensationally the highly favored Russian Woman's Team LOST 2.5 to 1.5 to Uzbekistan with Facebook superstar Natanija Pogonina losing.
My devoted daughter Julia Elizabeth Sloan is strong enough to play on the Latvian Woman's Team if only she would return to her country and recover her sanity. (Do they allow insane people to play in the Olympiad?). She used to be rated nearly 2400 but
now is down to 2100 and going lower.
I am opposed to having these fake teams. I do not believe there should be teams for blind, deaf and disabled. If so, there should be a team for crazy people. My daughter would never make it because there are many stronger crazy chess players than her.
The strong team from Georgia drew a game against the deaf team. The reason? The top deaf player is Gruenfeld who used to be one of the strongest players in the world. Then they claimed he had an unfair advantage being deaf because he did not have to
listen to the clatter by the chess players.
Sam Sloan

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 10:25:34 -0700 (PDT), samsloan
<[email protected]> wrote:

I am opposed to having these fake teams. I do not believe there should be teams for blind, deaf and disabled. If so, there should be a team for crazy people. My daughter would never make it because there are many stronger crazy chess players than her.
The strong team from Georgia drew a game against the deaf team. The reason? The top deaf player is Gruenfeld who used to be one of the strongest players in the world. Then they claimed he had an unfair advantage being deaf because he did not have to

listen to the clatter by the chess players.

The ONLY time I recall this being an issue was during the Tigran
Petrosian - Robert Huebner match in 1970-71 or thereabouts. Apparently
they had jackhammers digging up the pavement outside the theatre.
Petrosian took off his hearing aid while Huebner suffered in silence
and gave up the match after game 7 which he lost (the first 6 were
draws)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)