Canada vs. Chile:

Today’s match-up was a closer one, both on paper and in practice, but as the 27th seed facing the 67th, Canada was still heavily favoured to come out on top.

Oksana had by far the smoothest game of the round, with clinical positional play on the Black side of a French Tarrasch. Maili-Jade also won fairly quickly with White, despite a bad opening, when her opponent lost the thread in the middle game, spoiled her advantage in a complicated position, and then fatally blundered a piece. I wonder if the 2-0 match score at that point prompted Bich Ngoc to play for a draw in her own game, since that draw sealed the overall match in Canada’s favour, with Svitlana’s result still to come on Board 3 (Yunshan sat today). Bich Ngoc’s final position was deadlocked with no real winning chances for either side, but she had a clear advantage just a few moves earlier, with more aggressive options available to her, if she had wanted to press for a win. It’s a sign of selflessness and good team spirit that she passed up her chance to fight for more, sacrificing a few rating points, in order to avoid any risk of endangering the team’s match win with a loss on her board. That prudence turned out to be quite relevant, as well, because a win slipped out of Svitlana’s fingers late in the endgame, and in fact she wound up taking a painful loss, meaning that we won the match by the minimum margin of 2.5-1.5.

Current record: 2-0 (6.5/8), =29th with Italy, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Next opponent: the 7th-seeded USA.

Over in the open section, the guys punished Norway for leaving World #1 Magnus Carlsen out of their lineup today. They held the 6th-ranked team to a 2-2 drawn match in a major upset, with White winning all four games. The two grandmasters on the Canadian team, Shawn Rodrigue-Lemieux and Razvan Preotu, notched the victories on Boards 1 and 3.

1. Oksana puts on a clinic in positional play

2. Svitlana nearly makes it 3 wins for Canada in Round 2