Server failure ends final

Both finalists Russia and India have been declared winners of the first Online Chess Olympiad. The first match of their final had ended 3:3. The return match was tied 1,5:1,5, when the remaining Indian players lost their connections. Humpy Koneru managed to reconnect, but her position was bad and she soon lost. Nihal Sarin who had a drawish position and Divya Deshmukh who had a clear, but not decisive edge didn’t manage to reconnect and overstepped the time. The Indian Chess Federation submitted a protest. It was established that the cause didn’t lay in India nor with hosting platform Chess.com but with servers run by Cloudflare. After the appeals committee could not agree what to do, FIDE President Arkadi Dvorkovich decided to give gold to both finalists. Two days earlier FIDE had rejected a similar protest by Armenia.