I’ve got a lot of those. In the last year I have been collecting and piling material, without posting any of it. When I did think about publishing some of it, my intention had a magical ability to coincide with some great chess event. Today I have no idea what is going on in the vicinity of Wijk aan Zee, and news from the Rock are nothing to me, on this day. (La, la, la, la…)Instead I’ll dive into the middle of my material, which brings me back to September 2018, Batumi, Georgia, where the Chess Olympiad was held.
There is a lot I could write about the Olympiad. Perhaps starting with that: viewed from a perspective of global (and European) tourism, Georgia is still something of a hidden gem; a wine-producing, mountainous, friendly country, with a great cuisine. (I’m completely focusing on the things that I find most appealing, and my short description is surely a bit one sided. Still, I recommend chess lovers to visit Batumi in the autumn, when the European Team Championship is held there in October-November.) But, I will stop there and get to the games, which are what matters most to me.
The Swedish team did very well and reached 11:th place, which was quite a good result for us, a team rated as no.32. From a personal point I didn’t do too well. I was very lucky in round 2 and 6 and in round 4 I was completely out-played by Maxim Rodshtein. In round 7 I blundered a pawn on move 17 and had to turn to tricks in order to turn the game around, something I eventually succeeded in. The game was later chosen as the “game of the round”, went on to win “best game of the Olympiad” and was presented as the best game of the year by chess.com. I am of course quite happy about this and can agree that the game might merit a “crowd-pleaser of the year”, but I’m less sure about the whole “best”-thing. Anyway, you can find the game on a number of sites (for instance here) and I will not comment further on it here. Instead I want to present two of the wonderful games that my team mates produced: