Vishwanathan Anand opens up on playing the Chess Olympiad 2020 virtually

Indian Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand revealed how he felt while playing the game of chess virtually in the recently concluded Chess Olympiad 2020. 'Vishy' remarked that the change in format this year helped Team India and at the same time, is also confident that the viewers might have also enjoyed this innovative method as well. 

'Matches were very close': Viswanathan Anand

"This year has been a very unusual year and this is the first time that I have played in the team and everyone is sitting at home. So the vibe is totally different but at the same time, the team spirit and camaraderie was very good,' said Anand during an exclusive interview with Republic World. 

"I had the feeling that the pressure was equally spread. The final matches were very close. The Russia match unfortunately the second match had to be canceled because of a global outage. Then the only solution was to share the medals,''  the multiple-time world champion added. 

'We already had one outage': Anand

Meanwhile, Anand also revealed that the Indian team had also faced an outage during their group game against Mongolia.

"Well, we already had one outage in the group stage against Mongolia which wouldn't impact so much because we were almost certain to qualify for the knockout stage, but it would have hurt us in our next round match.  After that, the whole team got together. Everybody got extra internet connections so I added mobile data linked by the net and everybody doubled down and so I was genuinely surprised how after all these precautions everything failed and for a few minutes I was confused that how this could happen but then it turned out that the problem wasn't with us, it was global.''

 

Team India clinch gold

In a dramatic finish at the 2020 Chess Olympiad, India have been crowned as joint gold medal winners along with Russia on Sunday. Taking the final to the very last breath, two Indian players were declared to have lost on time in the final round. However, both the players had faced a connectivity issue, as a result of an internet connection. Following the complaint lodged by the Indian side, the International Chess Federation declared India and Russia as joint winners of the gold. The federation has informed that it will release a statement pertaining to the matter soon. 

Owing to the pandemic, this was the first time in history that the Chess Olympiad was conducted virtually. Nihal Sarin and Divya Deshmukh lose connection with the server and lose on time, with the latter being in a more dominating position before the connectivity issue. However, the Indian contingent rushed to lodge an appeal after the loss. FIDE immediately informed that it would investigate the matter before announcing the result. After about an hour of the result, FIDE announced that FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich had made a decision to give gold medals of to both teams.