In the opening round of any Swiss league event — where the top half of the seeds play the lower half — mismatches are a norm.
As a result, one-sided encounters remain the order of the day. Amid these emerges a player or two, who returns from an elite competition like the Chess Olympiad, with a special reason to recall and rejoice.
Angola’s No. 1 David Silva surely collected the biggest takeaway from his maiden visit to India when he held World No. 5 Levon Aronian to a draw, and that too, in a superior position, before top seed USA coasted to a 3.5-0.5 victory.
For Silva, an International Master rated at a modest 2315, this draw would have felt bigger than any victory in his career. After all, he proved equal to a two-time World Cup winner, rated 2775, by making light of a whopping rating difference of 460 points!
After spoiling Aronian’s Olympiad debut for the USA, Silva said, “It was a very difficult game against a top-10 player in the world. I was scared. I was trying to do something as I had nothing to lose. From this game, I learnt so many things and I am going to use them in the coming ones.”
In fact, Silva could have pressed for a win after Aronian traded a rook for a bishop on the 18th move but gained nothing in the bargain. Eventually, with USA leading 2-0 in a match where it rested spearhead Fabiano Caruana, Silva was a happy man to earn a draw in 41 moves.
For the host, as expected, there were 4-0 victories for all three teams against low-rated rivals. Only Nihal Sarin for India 2 and S. P. Sethuraman for India 3 took longer than expected to win.
The results:
First round: India 1 bt Zimbabwe 4-0 (Vidit Gujrathi bt Rodwel Makoto; Arjun Erigaisi bt Spencer Masango; S. L. Narayanan bt Emarald Takudzwa Mushore; K. Sasikiran bt Jemusse Zhemba).
UAE lost to India 2 0-4 (Omran Al Hosani lost to D. Gukesh; Ibrahim Sultan lost to Nihal Sarin; Saeed Laily Mohamed lost to B. Adhiban; Al Taher Abdulrahman Mohammad lost to Raunak Sadhwani).
India 3 bt South Sudan 4-0 (S. P. Sethuraman bt Deng Cypriano Rehan; Abhijeet Gupta lost to Mach Duany Ajak; M. Karthikeyan bt Gong Thon Gong; Abhimanyu Puranik bt Majur Manyang Peter).
Angola lost to USA 0.5-3.5; Lebanon lost to Norway 0.5-3.5; Spain bt Wales 4-0; Syria lost to Poland 0-4; Azerbaijan bt Algeria 4-0; Jordan lost to Netherlands 0-4; Ukraine bt Thailand 4-0; Sudan lost to Germany 0-4; England bt Cyprus 4-0.
