FIDE DECISION TO SHARE OLYMPIAD HONOURS DRAGS INDIA INTO AN UNSEEMLY ROW

NEW DELHI: Chess lives and breathes on the internet and is considered a perfect global game allied to ever-increasing connectivity speed. India are celebrating a first after being declared on Sunday as joint winners with Russia of online chess Olympiad. But the tournament pushed into the virtual world because of the pandemic has triggered a row over crashed connectivity and a decision forced by it. India’s victory mood has been tempered by criticism of the decision by Fide’s Russian president Arkady Dvorkovich that the title will be shared after India’s appeal during the final. Russia would have been winners as they were 4.5-1.5 ahead. Sunday witnessed a major global internet outage and a Fide report says it was caused by a Cloudflare crash. Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) which acts as an intermediary between client and server. Dvorkovich being Russian has put him in an awkward position amid claims that it is to appease the strong Indian chess community. A critic on twitter even quoted George Orwell’s Animal Farm (“…but some animals are more equal than others!”) in the timeline of Armenian GM Levon Aronian, his team’s captain in the tournament. Fide’s decision has particularly come in for criticism because a similar protest by Armenia after a player lost connectivity in the first round of their quarter-final against India was rejected. Russian GM Ian Nepomniachtchi’s tweet on Sunday summed up mood in his camp. “Smart decision to please Indian chess community ... Selective nobleness .” Russia’ s former women’ s world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk tweeted. “There is a huge difference between actually “winning” or just being awarded one without winning a single game in the final.”