Clarification for Quitting the Online Olympiad

[Kaiqi Yang]

It is ok you have your judgement. Everyone has their own judgement. But it cannot save Victor from being negligent of his responsibility.

As a responsible captain, one should fully acknowledge and communicate with the players regarding their strategy and judgement ahead of time properly, especially when their strategy and
judgement is against how the team was initially formed, the official team line-up, also considering since family tie involved in the team this time, in order to avoid any possible misunderstandings among the players, for the well-being of the team as a whole.

Unfortunately, Victor let the judgement and strong bias lead his decisions, and treated player unfairly and arrogantly with zero respect and acknowledgement.

When the basic rights as a player can not be protected, how can we even discuss other responsibilities further.

[Victor Plotkin]

Why should I use the USCF rating? Canada is an independent country.

Nikolay never played a tournament in USA. Your last tournament in America was back in 2017.

Mark played a few tournaments in USA in recent years, gained a lot of USCF rating points, but still not enough games to reflect his improvement (his FIDE jumped from 2169 to 2435 in less than 2 years). His USCF rating reflects something like 2320 FIDE - a very low number for him now. At least his last many tournaments (including 2/5 in the online Olympiad) show an absolutely different picture.

For Raja USCF rating indeed is pretty reliable, since he was playing mostly in States. His USCF-FIDE gap (2549-2448=101 points) looks slightly higher than the average gap, but nothing special here.

Again, I always say that FIDE rating is the best one to compare for 2400+ players... Until somebody takes advantage of some loopholes in the system.

[Egidijus Zeromskis]

Mr .Yang, what is your definition of the team's captain? Same thing regarding the national team and its players responsibilities during the tournament?


My short investigation of ratings charts:

The "normal" FIDE rating trends show that 3 players are comparable strength, and NN rating higher than others average. Thus, the team's order gets into a hand's of the captain experience, knowledge of players, and the vision. The same goes for a team composition for individual teams matches.


In any situation I remember the final scene from Burn after Reading: "I guess we learned not to do it again." Thus there should be more communications both ways in the team, especially with new members.

[Kaiqi Yang]

Also, if you really use your calculation for the good of Team Canada, why not take credit and use USCF rating into your calculation since one of our teammates is residence in US and didn’t play in Canada for years?

So here is the calculation with USCF rating. I couldn’t find Nicolay’s USCF so I didn’t include him here.

	USCF	FIDE	Average
Kaiqi	2544	2481	2,512.50
Raja	2549	2448	2,498.50
Mark	2398	2435	2,416.50

See, the result was quite different. It doesn't mean anything, but that is why FIDE rating is used as a universal and comparable standard for all players in international events.

I guess you just want to get the result for what you want.

[Kaiqi Yang]

Victor,

I don’t know why my personal experience relates to your captain's statement.

I have played international chess tournaments in at least 14 countries, but since you are having a problem with my trip to Serbia, even I don’t have to share my privacy with you, let me share it here.

I was holding a Chinese passport, Serbia was the only European destination where I didn't need to apply for a visa, so I could save myself from visa waiting time and paperwork to fit my time frame. I went there in 2018 and 2019, spent 3 months in total, over 100 days, played 99 games including both round-robin and Swiss tournaments. I got two GM norms there plus the first norm where I got in Philippine, 2009, to apply for my GM title.

Since you keep mentioning the round-robin system, let me remind you that your son also attended three round-robin tournaments recently to help him get his final IM norm.

Again, I don’t think any of this relates to your unprofessionalism and arrogance as a captain in this 2020 Online Olympiad.

[Lucas Davies]

I would like to see a grudge match between the players involved here streamed LIVE on national Twitch.tv. I think that this would bring in some good viewership and boost interest in chess in Canada.

[Kaiqi Yang]

Now you perfectly verified that your whole arrangement towards me is personal.

Again, you just played around here without admitting your simple intention.

The team was formed based on FIDE rating, there is no point arguing about CFC ratings when they are not the criteria. You re-defined the definition of "reserve players" in your own dictionary.

Since you seem so confident about your calculation, you should show it to the team before the tournament not after everything happened already. Now It is just excuse and deception.

You are so disrespectful of the whole FIDE system, ironically you are even here as the captain for a FIDE event.

[Victor Plotkin]

I always pushed towards using FIDE rating only for our Open Olympic qualifications. It was one of the main changes which was proposed by me and accepted by CFC in 2016 (the CFC used average CFC-FIDE rating before). My opinion was that for 2400+ players, only FIDE rating is important.

However, in this specific case, I could not trust very high FIDE rating achieved by Kaiqi during his round robin tournaments in Hungary and Serbia. If I made no mistake, he played 11 round-robin tournaments in Hungary and Serbia and gained a total of 102 points. Before his first tournament of this kind, his rating was 2430 which was in my opinion absolutely fair number for this player at that time. After that, he gained 102 points in Europe and lost almost 50 (!) points in Canada. His CFC rating of 2475 reflects FIDE rating of around 2360-2380 because for most Ontario players of this level, the CFC-FIDE gap is between 100 and 120 points.

For example:

N. Noritsyn: CFC rating 2615 FIDE rating 2512. The gap is 103 points.

R. Preotu: CFC rating 2629 FIDE rating 2487. The gap is 142 points.

A. Samsonkin: CFC rating 2534 FIDE rating 2428. The gap is 106 points.

M. Plotkin: CFC rating 2549 FIDE rating 2435. The gap is 114 points.

R. Panjwani: CFC rating 2524 FIDE rating 2448. The gap is 76 points (Raja did not play any tournaments in Canada in the past few years and during that time, he gained some FIDE points in United States and Europe).

Even if I give Kaiqi benefit of the doubt that for some reason he plays worse in Canada than out of the country, the gap should be 60 points at least. That means FIDE of 2415 reflects his real strength. Which is pretty close or slightly lower than FIDE of both Raja and Mark.

Every 2500+ Canadian player knows about this artificial inflation of Kaiqi's FIDE rating. I spoke about it with many of them and we have very similar opinion.

I'm not going to say that Kaiqi's GM title was not made in accordance with official FIDE regulations. However, these 11 tournaments could not change my opinion about his normal strength.

[Victor Plotkin]

My approach for the Olympiad always was: the best player will play more games. While Nikolay's advantage over other players was absolutely clear to me (probably to everyone else in Canada as well) I didn't see any significant differences between the 3 other players. That's why I expected them to play equal or almost equal amount of games each.

I had to put somebody on board 2, somebody on reserve-1 position and somebody on reserve-2 position, but in this particular case it was nothing more then the formal requirement for FIDE. The only difference between board 2 and reserve player is that if they both play in the same match (like happened in round 2 against Poland) board 2 player moves to board 1, while reserve player plays on board 2.

There is no correlation between the system we use for team qualification and the ranking position or the amount of games played by any team member. According to our qualification system, Kaiqi was the second player to make the team. However my understanding is that his real strength was equal or probably lower than the strength of the 2 other players.

Had we played over-the-board classical tournament, I would have preferred Nikolay to play 7-8 games. In this kind of event, I guessed that 2 games/day against higher rated opponents is enough, that's why I wanted him to play 6 games so 4 games for everyone else.

If Nikolay plays 6 games, somebody plays less than 50% from the very beginning. He played 3 games in first 4 rounds, so somebody else had to play 1. Since Mark won his first game, the decision to put him for the third round was relatively easy to me. So, the line-up for the third round, Nikolay and Mark, was fairly obvious. It was very close call to choose between Kaiqi and Raja for round 4, and I had some small factors (too long to explain) to prefer Raja to play round 4 with white (basically I know he plays much stronger as white and is dangerous against stronger opponents).

That's why after some hesitation I put Raja for round 4. My intention was to play Kaiqi in round 5 in any case. I don't see any problem here. Indeed, 1/4 looks slightly lower, however 2/5 looks absolutely normal on the way to 4/9.

Actually, both of my decisions that Kaiqi did not like, placing Mark instead of him in Round 1 and Raja instead of him in Round 4, were both successful and significantly improved our tournament situation. Thanks to Mark's win in round 1 we won against Argentina and thanks to Raja's win in round 4, we won our match against very strong Cuban team.

To be continued...

[Lucas Davies]

1. Canada will never win a chess Olympiad anyway

Not with that attitude

[Victor Itkine]

The CFC team is a joke. Take GM's and use them. Get rid of coaches that cannot realize that the way to win is bring the strongest team. If Canada cannot pay to bring the strongest team then get off the pot and wait until the movement to a stronger team can be done. I agree with the GM if you don't play me then win without me . Basically Canada will never win without GM's.

1. Canada will never win a chess Olympiad anyway, even if all top GMs will participate, because there are at least dozen countries in the World where the chess traditions are much stronger. Like Norway will never win Olympics in ice hockey. At the 2016 chess Olympiad all best Canadian players were playing, and Canada achieved a very good result - 11th place. With some more luck it could be 4th place, but this is the limit.

2. According to CFC procedure, first the players for Olympiad are determined, and then players vote to elect the coach (captain). So, not coaches chose the players, but vice versa. On the online Olympiad it was different because of luck of time.

3. I agree that it would be nice to pay to the best players, and bring all the top GMs to Olympiads. The question is: who is willing to pay?

[Erik Malmsten]

1 out of 4 games in the first 4 rounds, maybe read the whole story before you post a comment here.

Thanks for reading my reply. I thought it stated that I agree with you as second board should play more times than the reserves. And that you still had the opportunity to play three or more games out of nine, but, by quitting you chose to play only one. It's your fault for only playing one game.

[John Brown]

The way I look at is that the Canadians never send the best team. They always have trouble with players, coaches etc. So if we want to win then we should send all Grand masters. If you think we will win with what we sent then we are all living in a very small bubble. Other teams send Grand masters we send active players. So either wake up and smell the coffee or get what we get...... people stepping down. The CFC team is a joke. Take GM's and use them. Get rid of coaches that cannot realize that the way to win is bring the strongest team. If Canada cannot pay to bring the strongest team then get off the pot and wait until the movement to a stronger team can be done. I agree with the GM if you don't play me then win without me . Basically Canada will never win without GM's. So start living with reality and stop arguing over the GM's withdrawal and wake up to your mistakes.

[Kaiqi Yang]

Placement of players at Olympiad is a strategy and not always it coincide with the the players' strengths and ratings. For example, the strongest Canadian player at 2018 Olympiad in Batumi Evgeny Bareev (FIDE rating 2666 at a time) was placed by Victor Plotkin for the board #4. And he never complained.

If the decision is for the team's good and it has been acknowledged and pre-communicated with players. I believe no player will complain. What we had in this Online Olympiad is the opposite.

[Victor Itkine]

Placement of players at Olympiad is a strategy and not always it coincide with the the players' strengths and ratings. For example, the strongest Canadian player at 2018 Olympiad in Batumi Evgeny Bareev (FIDE rating 2666 at a time) was placed by Victor Plotkin for the board #4. And he never complained.