Two rounds of an eleven-round Olympiad are worth almost nothing. Top seeds beat teams rated five hundred points below them, a few of those seeds sweat a bit, and the field starts sorting itself out somewhere around round six. Anyone drawing conclusions from India’s four match points from four is drawing on sand.
So ignore the results. Look at the team sheet instead, because that was filed before a single clock was started, and it says something the scoreboard doesn’t.
Gukesh Dommaraju is playing board four.
Two years ago in Budapest he played board one and won individual gold there. He is the reigning World Champion. He is, as of ten weeks from now, defending that title in Geneva against Javokhir Sindarov. And India have him behind Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi and Nihal Sarin.
Read that as a selection decision and it is shrewd. Board four means weaker opponents, more chances with White, a lower floor. It is the most sheltered seat on the team. Read it as a verdict on where Gukesh currently stands and it is brutal, and the evidence backs it up. He finished last at Norway Chess, losing five classical games and winning one. He went winless at the Chennai Grand Masters, three defeats, several of them from better positions squandered in time trouble. He has called his own form the elephant in the room. In round two here he could not beat an Indonesian IM, and the draw dropped him below 2700 for the first time in four years.
India’s captain has not demoted his World Champion. He has put him somewhere he can score.
The rest of the Open squad has offered no argument against the shelter
Arjun Erigaisi lost to a Thai IM on the opening day, the largest upset across all 208 matches. Praggnanandhaa, the Grand Chess Tour winner and nominally the top board, was rested in round one entirely. Indonesia were beaten by a single board point. None of that is disastrous, and India were not alone in scraping through — the United States, Uzbekistan, the Netherlands and Hungary all had uncomfortable afternoons. But Budapest’s India conceded half a point in twelve games. This one is grinding.
The women’s team is the opposite case
It deserves to be said plainly rather than buried. Koneru Humpy, Divya Deshmukh, Vaishali, Vantika Agrawal, Savitha Shri B. Three of the seven highest-rated players in the event, in one squad, with a Women’s World Cup champion on board two and a Women’s World Championship challenger on board three. They opened 4–0 and have not blinked while Georgia were held by Montenegro, Slovakia lost to Tajikistan and Norway lost to Kenya. Humpy said on arrival that India have the best team. She is not wrong, and the only real question is whether a side that won Budapest by a single point can handle being the hunted rather than the hunter.
The Global Chess League class of Season 4, scattered
They left Bengaluru five days ago and landed in thirteen different national shirts. Sindarov went from FYERS Icon to board one for the hosts. Levon Aronian and Stavroula Tsolakidou won the title together for Ganges Grandmasters and are now playing for the United States and Greece. Tsolakidou beat Humpy to seal that title on 13 September; round three has paired India against Greece. Franchise chess makes rivals into teammates for ten days a year. The Olympiad hands them back their flags and reminds everyone which loyalty was always the deeper one.
And then there is the gap where the rest of them should be
Magnus Carlsen, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Alireza Firouzja, Hikaru Nakamura, Daniil Dubov, Kateryna Lagno, Volodar Murzin, Leinier Dominguez, Harika Dronavalli. Declined, excluded, dropped or not selected. The biggest team event in chess is missing a startling amount of the sport’s top table, which makes the twelve days in Bengaluru earlier this month look, in hindsight, like the fuller field.
Nine rounds remain. India will probably still be near the top of both sections on the rest day, because teams this deep usually are. The thing worth watching is not the match points. It is whether the man at board four looks, by round eleven, like someone ready to defend a world title in November.
Because right now the team sheet suggests his own federation isn’t sure.
