Thursday 27 November 2008

Armenian chess players won Gold at the Chess Olympiad 2008!

We won! Moreover, we defended our chempion status ! (Armenia won Gold the previous Chess Olympiad 2006 in Torino too).

photo from armenianow.com
Here's our team:
  • Levon Aronyan
  • Vladimir Hakobyan
  • Gabriel Sargissian
  • Tigran L. Petrosyan (who was my classmate for some short period)
  • Artashes Minasian
During the final round, Armenia's only win came on board four where Tigran L. Petrosyan beat Chinese Li Chao.
Thank you Tigran and others!

And here's a nice photo report from the finals.


...and if you watch statistics of winners by each year in the wikipedia, you'll notice that USSR and post-soviet countries were almost in no competition for the recent decades.

For the second consecutive Olympiad, top-seed Russia failed to take a medal. From 1952 to 2004, they (and their predecessor the Soviet Union) never finished below second place.  (Guardian)

2 comments:

Amata said...

Wow! Cool. :) my congratulations! To win a Chess Olympiad - it's quite difficult.. One must be very clever. Now I know, that not only Jews can be called the smartest ones, Armenians too ;)

Julia Riber Pitt said...

Chess is pretty hard to master. You always have to predict how your opponent will react. Yay for the Armenian team. I wonder why it is that the former USSR countries do so well in chess? Maybe it's that good old communist way of thinking, haha.