Gukesh Slips Under 2700, and Montenegro Delivers the Upset of the Tournament
By Cameron W. · Thu, 17 Sep 2026
The second round of the Chess Olympiad in Samarkand saw the introduction of top players from leading teams, with several teams securing victories and some dropping points along the way.
Round two in Samarkand produced two storylines that will carry well past the day itself: a symbolic rating milestone nobody wanted to see fall, and a shock result from the same delegation that spent opening week fighting a very different kind of battle.Gukesh drops below 2700 for the first time in four yearsIndia beat Indonesia to stay unbeaten, but the number everyone will remember from that match belongs to Gukesh Dommaraju. His draw with IM Satria Duta Cahaya pushed his live rating below 2700 for the first time in four years, extending a slide that's now been building for the better part of two seasons. It's the same decline that had already dropped him to the fourth spot in India's own board order heading into this Olympiad, and every data point like this one adds weight to the question hanging over him heading into his November title defense against Javokhir Sindarov: whether the belief that produced his historic 2024 Olympiad campaign is still there to be found, or whether it needs finding all over again.Montenegro, fresh off a hotel nightmare, delivers the shock of the tournamentIf any team had an excuse for a slow start in Samarkand, it was Montenegro, whose federation was named directly in the accommodation crisis that dogged the Olympiad's opening days, with FIDE's own accommodation office confirming some of its delegation had no rooms booked at all. Round two suggests nobody told the players to lower their expectations. Montenegro's women's team held second-seeded Georgia to a 2-2 draw, a result built on two separate upsets: WFM Alena Skvortsova, rated 300 points below her opponent, beat GM Bela Khotenashvili outright, and WIM Aleksandra Milovic then took down IM Lela Javakhishvili after Javakhishvili let a winning position slip away. Two results like that on the same day, against a genuine podium contender, make this the biggest team upset of the tournament so far.Ukraine keeps rolling on both boardsUkraine's men beat Estonia 3-1 and its women swept Lithuania 4-0, extending a strong start on both fronts despite Vasyl Ivanchuk dropping his individual game on board two for the men. The women's team in particular has yet to concede a single match point across two rounds.The host nation's neighbors are making noise tooTurkmenistan opened with back-to-back 4-0 sweeps, over Timor-Leste and Liechtenstein, before running into considerably stiffer tests in round two: Serbia for the men and Poland for the women, the kind of pairing that will show whether the fast start reflects genuine form or simply a kind favorable draw.Where the tournament standsTwo rounds in, the story lines are already stacking on top of each other: a world champion whose rating keeps sliding at the worst possible moment, and a small federation turning a miserable week off the board into one of the loudest results on it.