Trom­soe Chess Olympiad 2014 Round 9

I started with a decent win against Caru­ana after the rest day. Since then my play has been unusu­ally erratic.

Spoil­ing a much bet­ter posi­tion against Najditsch and even los­ing in the end was pretty tough, espe­cially as we lost the match against Ger­many 2.5–1.5.

I wasn’t happy with my play yes­ter­day against Borki Pre­do­je­vic either, but it was enough to win.

Today we faced Turkey and in the NRK live stu­dio after the game one of the reporters ques­tioned my inspi­ra­tion. The prob­lem today was rather too much inspi­ra­tion. In a top­i­cal Slav set-up I went for a g4-g5 plan, while miss­ing the strength of Solak’s coun­ter­play a pawn down. With­out a safe haven for my king I chose to cas­tle long. He main­tained a strong ini­tia­tive but seemed to panic in time trou­ble, and after his a3-check I was call­ing the shots and man­aged to win the tricky end­ing. With two draws and a loss on the other boards we drew against Turkey and needs to win tomor­row against Croa­tia in the penul­ti­mate round.

Norway2 came close to another sen­sa­tion today but lost 2.5–1.5 against Rus­sia in the end.

I look for­ward to the rest day after tomorrow!