Azerbaijan Wins European Team Championship

The main recent event to finish was the European Team Championship in Greece, won by a strong but still overperforming Azeri team, which finished ahead of the Russian team on tiebreaks. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov handled board 1 duties admirably, defeating Alexander Grischuk and David Navara (among others), while on board 4 Rauf Mamedov played superhero chess, going undefeated and scoring 8/9 (with a 2920 TPR, gaining 22.8 points to break 2700 for the first time in his career). Their triumph was all the more impressive, and surprising, considering that they lost in the very first round to Italy - a middle-of-the-pack team not even remotely among the favorites - and drew with Spain in round 3.

But they climbed back, achieving critical victories in round 6 over Armenia (Levon Aronian beat Mamedyarov, but the Azeris won on the remaining boards 2.5-.5) and round 8 over Russia (3-1, with Mamedyarov, Radjabov, and Mamedov defeating Grischuk, Nepomniachtchi, and Dubov, respectively). In round 9 their five-match winning streak came to an end as they drew Ukraine, preventing the Ukranians from leapfrogging them into first. It allowed the Russians to catch up on match points - both teams finished with 14 match points on the 2-1-0 scoring system (+6-1=2 for Azerbaijan, +7-2 for Russia). Ukraine took the bronze on tiebreaks ahead of the scrappy 14th-seeded Croatian team (both were +6-2=1); the latter led briefly after defeating the Germans in round 5.

There was a bit of controversy in the last round in the Azerbaijan-Ukraine match. The first two games to finish were short, uneventful draws, but Naiditsch was brilliantly destroying Ponomariov while Eljanov had a small advantage against Mamedyarov. The claim, made by Nepomniachtchi on Twitter and by others too, was that the team captains illegally made a package draw with the two games. Maybe so - it wouldn't be the first time in the history of chess such a deal had been struck - but it would be very, very strange for the Azeris to do this. For one thing, Mamedyarov was generally just slightly worse (or even on the "worse" side of equality), while Naiditsch was winning almost to the very end. For another thing, it wasn't clear that Azerbaijan would finish ahead of Russia on tiebreaks. (Sonneborn-Berger, not head-to-head, was the key tiebreak, and the Russians thought that a 3-1 win over Germany in the last round would give them the gold. They eventually got the 3-1 victory, when Nepo beat Meier in 86 moves, but it finally turned out not to be enough.)

Some links: Final results, the tournament website, Chess24's last round report, and here are some games that caught my eye.