Round 8 in numbers

Germany came into the round fourth, and the match turned on boards 3 and 4. Frederik Svane beat Nodirbek Yakubboev with White in 29 moves, Yakubboev's first loss after five wins and a draw. Replay Rasmus Svane beat Shamsiddin Vokhidov with Black in 51, so both brothers won for the second round running. Replay Javokhir Sindarov got one back for Uzbekistan, beating Matthias Bluebaum with White in 48, and Vincent Keymer and Nodirbek Abdusattorov drew board 1 in 62. At 2764 against 2762 that was the highest-rated game of the round. Replay

Frederik Svane is on 6½ from 8 now, unbeaten, with five wins. Uzbekistan and Germany both have 14 match points; Uzbekistan are ahead on game points, 24 to 21½.

India and Azerbaijan drew all four games. The site has an award for that, a 2–2 of four draws, called the Treaty of Samarkand, and the Open had three of them today. Gukesh drew with Mahammad Muradli in 56 moves and is on 6½ from 8. Replay

The USA were the team of the round, 3½–½ against Serbia and a performance of 2916 against opposition averaging 2616. Fabiano Caruana beat Alexey Sarana with White in 43, Hans Moke Niemann beat Aleksandar Indjic with Black in 42, and Awonder Liang beat Velimir Ivic, also with Black, in 66. Replay

The Netherlands and Armenia drew 2–2 on two wins with Black. Shant Sargsyan beat Loek Van Wely in 55, and Jorden Van Foreest beat Robert Hovhannisyan in 56 with a knight promotion on the way, 39...c1=N+. Replay

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Wei Yi won with Black against Szymon Gumularz in 35, and that was the difference in China's 2½–1½ against Poland. Replay France beat Iran by the same score, with Maxime Vachier-Lagrave beating M. Amin Tabatabaei in 38. Replay

China beat Georgia 2½–1½, the best team performance of the section at 2551. Three boards were drawn, and on board 4 Zhai Mo beat Lela Javakhishvili with White in 29 moves. Replay China have 15 match points from 16, one clear of Kazakhstan, Armenia and Mongolia.

Kazakhstan and India drew 2–2. Alua Nurman, an IM, beat Vaishali with Black in 46. Replay India's point came from Savitha Shri, who beat Elnaz Kaliakhmet with White in 61. Seven games at this Olympiad, seven wins. Replay Bibisara Assaubayeva and Humpy Koneru drew board 1 in 36, the highest-rated game of the section today. Replay

Armenia beat the USA 2½–1½ on Elina Danielian's win over Irina Krush in 43. Replay Mongolia, seeded 15th, beat Bulgaria by the same score, Turmunkh Munkhzul beating Nadya Toncheva with White in 49. Replay That's two wins in two rounds for Mongolia against teams that started above them.

Marc Arnold Amako of Côte d'Ivoire and Bernardo Roselli Mailhe of Uruguay played 88 moves on board 256 and took five awards between them.

Amako's king left e1 on move 11, 11.Kf1, with both queens on and castling still allowed. The site calls that a Royal Walkabout. Replay His queen then travelled 126 squares in 50 moves, about 155 metres at human scale, the Sporty Queen of the round and exactly the Open's record from round 5. Fifty of his 88 moves were to or from the a- and h-files, the Professional Edger award. On move 32 he forked king and queen with 32.Ng6+ and won the queen next move, a Family Fork. Replay

And he lost. Roselli Mailhe, an IM rated 2311, kept both rooks on Amako's second rank for the last ten moves of the game, which is called Pigs on the 7th, and won in 88. Replay

Nohar Anganoo of Saint Kitts and Nevis spent 61 minutes and 21 seconds on one move, 8.Qb3. That's the Longest Think of the round and 32 seconds short of the Open's record, Baadur Jobava's in round 6. He lost in 28. Replay

The longest game of the round went 125 moves on board 3, Steven Rojas Salas of Peru against Joe Assaad of Lebanon, and it was drawn. Assaad played 76 of those moves with under five minutes on his clock, from move 39 on. Replay The queens stayed on until 121...Kxf6, four moves from the end, the latest queen trade of the event by 47 moves. Replay

Molissa Francita Ashton of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines had a bare king against a queen, a bishop, a knight and two pawns, 17 points of material, and her opponent from Djibouti stalemated her. The award for being stalemated while behind is called Houdini, and 17 points is the most anyone has been down at this Olympiad and still drawn that way. Replay

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Il Vaticano turned up twice. It's two bishops on one rank, three files apart, with two enemy pawns between them, a joke from r/AnarchyChess that the site counts for real. Sai Krishna G V of Canada made one against Emre Can with 20.Bf4 Replay, and Wanyao Sarah Sun of New Zealand with 18.Ba6 Replay. That makes eight in eight rounds.

A good day for Grenada. Omario Pope, rated 1431, beat Cheikh Sidy Mohamed Deme of Senegal, 1864, with Black in 18 moves, the biggest upset of the Open today at 433 points. Replay And in the Women's section Rhonda J Lambert mated in 10 moves, queen to f7 with the bishop on c4 behind it, the fastest mate of the round. Replay

Gawain C B Maroroa Jones gave 20 checks in a row, from move 36 to move 55, against Abdimalik Abdisalimov of Uzbekistan 2. That's the longest run of checks in the Open this Olympiad, four short of Khady Niang's 24 in the Women's section last round. It was a draw, and Uzbekistan 2 beat England 2½–1½ on Khumoyun Begmuratov's win in 75. Replay

The Open's other underpromotion was also a knight with check, 67...dxc1=N+ by Flawer Habtu Moges of Ethiopia, who won in 69. Replay

Age, in a line. Bodhana Sivanandan, born in 2015, played board 1 for England and lost to Deysi Cori T. in 79 moves. Replay

Lichess analyses every finished broadcast game on its own servers, and by the evening 100% of Open moves and 99.9% of Women's moves had an evaluation, so the accuracy and blunder numbers are Lichess's, not mine. Relay clocks are chaos, so the script looks for the jump where the 30-minute bonus actually lands instead of trusting move 40. Forfeits never count for move stats, ties are shown instead of broken, and every award links to the exact move.

Tonight's note is about how a game ends. The relay sends moves and a result, not the reason, so a game that the loser seems to be winning on the last move gets a second look. If the loser's clock is at zero, it's a loss on time and everything in it counts. If the loser still had time, the relay has missed the real ending: the result stands, and the moves stay out of the statistics. Two Women's games went that way tonight, both lost by White with a forced mate on the board, and the relay had given one of them to White; chess-results has it for Black. One more result was corrected from the official tables: a game the relay had as a draw, which Black won. And the relay itself changes after a round: one Open game lost its last move between two runs this evening, which moved the round's biggest blunder to another game.

Round 9 is tomorrow, and its pairings go on the site as soon as chess-results has them. Three rounds are left: 9 and 10 on the next two days, and round 11 on Sunday at 08:15 CEST. Every round gets its own page, now with a tree of every opening played, the Upset of the Round page draws every upset of the event, and there are team standings with the official tie-breaks. The site is unofficial and not affiliated with FIDE, the organisers or Lichess.

Got an idea for an award? Lichess comments and the r/chess round thread both reach me.

And thanks again to the Lichess broadcast team. Without the relay, none of this exists.