Weekly Recap: Uzbekistan's Wild Ride Through the Samarkand Olympiad

No single week this year has been shaped by one tournament quite like this one. The 46th Chess Olympiad in Samarkand produced five separate storylines on its own, from a home team’s near-perfect run to the upset that briefly ended it, while the rest of the chess world kept moving with new events, an election, and a record-setting field.

Round 5 opened the week with chaos nobody quite expected. Germany stunned top-seeded USA while Uzbekistan routed Hungary, a day that began with ceremonial photo shoots and ended with several leading teams blindsided.

Round 6 belonged to the hosts outright. Uzbekistan beat India 2.5-1.5 to take sole lead of the Open section, with the match turning on GM Nihal Sarin missing a tactic on board three that he had every reason to see coming.

Players got one breather in the middle of it all. Nearly 300 players, captains and accompanying persons boarded eight buses for a Cultural Program Tour through the city’s oldest and newest landmarks before the tournament resumed.

Round 7 pushed Uzbekistan’s run to a perfect seven for seven. The hosts beat China 3-1, putting them two full match points clear of a chasing pack that included the Netherlands, India, Germany, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

That perfect run finally cracked in round eight. Germany beat Uzbekistan 2.5-1.5, with brothers Frederik and Rasmus Svane delivering the decisive wins on boards three and four against Nodirbek Yakubboev and Shamsiddin Vokhidov.

The lead didn’t stay away long. Uzbekistan beat the United States 2.5-1.5 in round nine while Germany fell to India, putting the hosts back alone on top with two rounds still to play.

Away from the results on the board, Samarkand kept setting records of its own. The field reached a confirmed 205 open teams and 189 women’s teams once Angola joined for round three, the biggest the Olympiad has ever assembled, with a smaller quieter expansion tucked inside that number.

The Olympiad’s sidelines produced news too. The Commonwealth Chess Association signed a partnership with Chessveda to jointly build out digital chess activity across Commonwealth nations.

A continental election also went down during the event. José Antonio Carrillo was re-elected President of FIDE Americas by a vote of 29 to 12 on September 24.

Outside Samarkand, the calendar kept filling up. Africa’s October slate carries 22 tracked tournaments, headlined by a five-section festival in Tunisia, while Oceania’s October calendar lists 30 tournaments, nearly all of them Australian due partly to a reporting gap rather than a true picture of the region’s activity.

Chess.com added two new events to its lineup this week. The Chess Club Showdown lets everyday players represent esports organizations alongside pros for a share of a $15,000 monthly prize fund, running on the last Wednesday of each month, and the Chess.com Seirawan Chess Championship runs September 30 to October 2 with a $2,500 prize fund.

The Total Chess World Championship Tour also locked in its Budapest pilot field. Levon Aronian, Liem Le, Jorden van Foreest, Abhimanyu Mishra, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and Andrew Hong joined a lineup already headlined by Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, with the event set for November 10 to 20 at the Anantara New York Palace Budapest Hotel.

Carlsen also showed up for a new bullet series this week. He edged Hikaru Nakamura on tiebreaks in the debut of 3+0 Thursday on September 24, a format that split into three separate 11-round Swiss brackets.