Russia gets Bronze at the 2013 Astana World Team Chess Championships

The 2013 Astana World Team Championships ended with the victory of the Ukrainian team with their top formation (Lahno, Ushenina, M. Muzychuk, Zhukova and Gaponenko), congratulations to a great team! The silver and bronze was taken by two teams that were not able to align their best formations, first China playing without Hou Yifan and Zhao Xue, and second Russia (Gunina, Kosteniuk, Pogonina, Galliamova, and Girya) playing without the Kosintseva sisters. My (Russian) team did well, with 4 players out of 5 receiving individual board medals (super performance by Olga Girya with 6.5/8 on the last board). I started on a roll with 4.5/5 and even though I lost the last 2 games, still ended up with a performance of 2502 and just about 1 Elo point gained. More info and photos about the event can be found below. I hope to comment one or more games soon for my YouTube channel. Read also the report on USA’s top chess blog www.chessblog.com.
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The Russian Women’s Chess Olympiad Team is ready for Istanbul 2012

The 2012 Istanbul Chess Olympiads are starting tomorrow, we just finished our 10-day training camps in the outskirts of Moscow. I will be playing as usual with the Russian national chess team (we’re the defending champions of the last Khanty-Mansiysk 2010 Olympiads). We have a terrific line-up:




GM Tatiana Kosintseva (2530)
GM Nadezhda Kosintseva (2524)
IM Valentina Gunina (2507)
GM Alexandra Kosteniuk (2489)
WGM Natalija Pogonina (2448)




We have three coaches dedicated to our women’s team: GM Sergei Rublevsky (2693), GM Alexander Riazantsev  (2712), and GM Evgeniy Najer (2664).




If you have an iPhone or iPad you can follow the results at any moment with the free 2012 Olympiad iOS app.

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