Chennai: The India-Russia chess duel for the Online Olympiad gold came to a dramatic finish on Sunday with the global chess body announcing them as joint winners.
FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich made a decision to give gold medals of FIDE Online #ChessOlympiad to both teams – India and Russia, FIDE tweeted.
The global chess body considered the appeal made by India as three games were affected due to server problems.
We just told FIDE that three of our players – K. Humpy, Nihal Sarin and Divya Deshmukh were logged out due to server crash during the second match of the final, non-playing Captain Srinath Narayanan said.
We had asked for a fair solution – a replay of three games, he added.
Soon after India made the appeal, FIDE had tweeted: In the second round of #ChessOlympiad final match India vs Russia, two Indian players Nihal Sarin and Divya Deshmukh lost connection to their games and forfeited on time. India filed an official appeal, the issue is now being investigated.
The Indian team has appealed stating it was due to a server crash of Cloudflare used by www.chess.com.
The first match ended with a score of 3-3 with all the six games ending in a draw.