Iran wins gold at World Youth Chess Olympiad (Photos)

The World Youth under-16 Chess Olympiad 2016 was held in Slovakia from July 21st to July 30th and attracted 261 players from 40 countries.

Iran faced Slovakia 2, Austria, Canada, Hungary, Armenia, Russia, Belarus, Serbia and Romania. Parham Maghsoodloo, Alireza Firouzja, FM Aryan Gholami, Arash Tahbaz, WFM Anahita Zahedifar and team captain Khosro Harandi finished first winning gold for Iran for the second consecutive year. Silver went to Russia and bronze to Armenia.

The Iranian team achieved very good performances in recent years at this event: 2016 (1st), 2015 (1st), 2014 (3rd), 2013 (8th), 2012 (2nd) and 2011 (3rd). As of August 2016, Iran has five top 100 junior players (FIDE).

Iranian team results after each round
Round 1 – Iran 4 : 0 Slovakia 2
Round 2 – Austria 2 : 2 Iran
Round 3 – Iran 4 : 0 Canada
Round 4 – Hungary 1 : 3 Iran
Round 5 – Iran 3 : 1 Armenia
Round 6 – Russia 1 : 3 Iran
Round 7 – Belarus 1 : 3 Iran
Round 8 – Iran 3 ½ : ½ Serbia
Round 9 – Iran 2 ½ : 1 ½ Romania

Sources: World Youth Chess Olympiad (WYCO) 2016 (Gallery), WYCO 2016 (Results by country), WYCO 2016 (Best players by board), FIDE (Top 100 junior players – Aug. 2016)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s