Six Rounds Down, Five to Go:
By Cameron W. · Tue, 22 Sep 2026
The Chess Olympiad reached its rest day with a settled picture at the top of the Open section and an unsettled one in the Women's, after six rounds that included a world champion's rating milestone, a family reunion on the Swedish board, and a scheduling dispute that ended up saying more about FIDE than about chess.
The Chess Olympiad reached its rest day with a settled picture at the top of the Open section and an unsettled one in the Women's, after six rounds that included a world champion's rating milestone, a family reunion on the Swedish board, and a scheduling dispute that ended up saying more about FIDE than about chess.From an eight-way logjam to Uzbekistan standing aloneThe Open section spent its first four rounds refusing to separate. By round four, eight teams, China, Uzbekistan, Germany, Armenia, India, the United States, Netherlands, and Hungary, were all still unbeaten. Round five started thinning that group out: Germany beat the tournament's top seed, the United States, leaving India, Uzbekistan, and Germany tied for the lead on perfect scores. Round six finished the job. Uzbekistan beat defending champions India 2.5-1.5 in the round's marquee pairing, a match decided when Nihal Sarin, better on both the board and the clock against Nodirbek Yakubboev, blundered his queen with half an hour still in hand. Germany's own perfect record fell the same day, losing to China. Uzbekistan now heads into the back half of the tournament as the sole leader on home soil, with China and Armenia a single point back and a genuinely crowded chase group, France, the Netherlands, Turkiye, and India, sitting just behind them.The Women's section never found a team worth trustingIf the Open section resolved into clarity, the Women's section did the opposite. Argentina and Iran both produced major upsets in round three, beating Ukraine and France respectively. Poland stunned defending champions India in round five. India answered back immediately in round six, beating the United States 3-1 behind wins from Savitha Shri and Vantika Agrawal, while Georgia handed the tournament another shock by beating host nation Uzbekistan on the same day. Six rounds in, this remains the section where results genuinely aren't predictable from the seedings, which makes it, if anything, the more interesting race to watch over the final stretch.The individual storylines that outlasted their own roundsA few threads have run through the whole tournament rather than just one day of it. Gukesh Dommaraju's rating dipped below 2700 for the first time in four years back in round two, part of a slump that had already dropped him to board four in India's own lineup, but he's answered with back-to-back wins since, keeping alive the question of whether his historic 2024 Olympiad form is something he can still find under pressure, a question with real stakes given his November World Championship defense against Uzbekistan's own Javokhir Sindarov. Austria's Felix Blohberger had the tournament's roughest run at the individual level, losing to a 2066-rated player in round one and to Sindarov himself in round three. And a dozen smaller stories added color along the way: 12-year-old Faustino Oro winning on board one in Argentina's round-one debut, Hans Niemann's crushing debut win for the United States, the Cramling family fielding a mother, daughter, and husband-captain trio for Sweden, and Levon Aronian pulling off a second dramatic escape from a losing position this year.The story that had nothing to do with chessThe tournament's most consequential story by round six wasn't a game at all. Israel's teams forfeited their round six matches after a Yom Kippur scheduling request couldn't be resolved with that round's opponents, a clean 4-0 loss to the Netherlands among the results. What turned it into a bigger story was a letter that surfaced afterward: FIDE had committed in writing, back in January, to exactly the accommodation Israel needed for that date. Round six's actual schedule simply didn't reflect a promise FIDE had already made eight months earlier, leaving Israel dependent on a last-minute negotiation that ultimately failed.Five rounds to decide it allRounds seven through eleven now carry two kinds of stakes at once. On the board, Uzbekistan's clean lead in the Open section will face its own tests against a chase group that's shown no sign of backing down, while the Women's section still has to produce a genuine favorite out of a field that's spent six rounds refusing to give it one. Off the board, the tournament's back half overlaps directly with FIDE's presidential election, with delegates voting on September 26 at the General Assembly in the same city the Olympiad is being played in. That means the rounds still to come will play out alongside the final days of an already contentious campaign between Timur Turlov, Wadim Rosenstein, and Jan Henric Buettner, with a candidates' Q&A session scheduled for September 24 as the last public forum before the vote itself. For a tournament that's already blurred the line between sporting drama and institutional drama more than once, there's no obvious reason to expect that to stop now.