NEW DELHI (India): World Chess Federation (FIDE) on Sunday declared India and Russia as joint winners of Online Chess Olympiad after Nihal Sarin and Divya Deshmukh lost connection to their games in the second round due to a server crash.
India were represented by legendary Viswanathan Anand, Koneru Humpy, Vidit Santosh Gujarthi, P Hari Krishna, Dronavalli Harika, Aravindh Chithambarm, Bhakti Kulkarni, R Vaishali, Nihal Sarin, Praggnanandha R, Divya Deshmukh and Vantika Agrawal.
India started the first round of the final on a surprising note by resting Anand and the match ended in a peace treaty after all six boards ended without decisive result.
In the crucial second round, Anand, Vidit and Harika drew their games against Ian Nepomniachtchi, Daniil Dubov and Alexandra Kosteniuk respectively while Divya was cruising for victory against Polina Shuvalova and games of Humpy against Aleksandra Goryachkina and Nihal with Andrey Esipenko were in balance.
At that moment disaster struck in the form of server crash for India as both Nihal and Divya lost their connection to their games and forfeited on time while Humpy lost crucial time on her clock and eventually lost the game to make a score line 1.5 – 4.5 in favour of Russia.
However, India filed an appeal about the server crash to the appeal committee and after due deliberations and investigation on server issues, FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich made a decision to award Gold Medals to both India and Russia.
