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WMSG Team Blitz: China Tops the Preliminaries |
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Monday, 13 October 2008 06:45 |
China produced another dominant display to top the 1st World Mind Sports Games Team Blitz and their women led the way!
After downing Ukraine 3-1 in Round 3, the Chinese girls then edged their main rivals Russia and then India 2.5-1.5 in the next two rounds to be all but sure of first place before the halfway mark.
It appeared that China was successfully adopting a strategy of dropping the player who lost in the previous round! But they then drew 2-2 against Hungary, and from then on their new strategy was to shuffle their players and that helped them get back on pace in the very next round with a 4-0 victory over a young Turkey team that is showing enormous potential.
  
L-R: All smiles - Russia, Vietnam and Turkey!
Relatively comfortable victories against Vietnam, Australia, Latvia and the USA then followed to brought China to first place with 21 match points.
Russia was a very comfortable second with 20 match points, dominating the rest of their opposition after losing to China, while Vietnam and Turkey with 15 and 14 match points respectively finished third and fourth and were the other deserving semi-finalists.
China's men were equally impressive notching up 18 match points against very tough competition to finish ahead of Ukraine on 17 match points. Hungary was third on 16 match points and India took the final semi-final spot on tie-break ahead of Vietnam after both got 15 match points.
So tomorrow's semi-finals will see:
Team Blitz Men
1. China vs India
2. Ukraine vs Hungary
Team Blitz Women
1. China vs Turkey
2. Russia vs Vietnam
As always, full coverage of the 1st World Mind Sports Games is at www.2008wmsg.org/en and all games are broadcast live and available for viewing and download daily at www.2008wmsg.fide.com.
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