India is set to face Armenia in the quarter-final of the Online Chess Olympiad.
Armenia had previously defeated India in the last Olympiad which was played in Batumi, Georgia. India lost to Armenia which resulted in the knockout of the Indian team in the starting round.
Armenia has the one of the best players Levon Aronian who is World number 7, whereas India has top seed Viswanathan Anand who is World number 15 as per FIDE rating of January 2020.
One of the interesting aspects of the Indian chess team playing in the FIDE Online Olympiad is that nearly half of the team members were being coached by two coaches.
The two coaches are 44-year old Grandmaster (GM) R.B. Ramesh and 26-year old (GM) Srinath Narayanan and two of their students have been ranked as top performers at the Olympiad for their respective boards.
The wards of Ramesh are - GM Aravindh Chithambaram, GM R. Praggnanandhaa, Woman GM R. Vaishali - while that of Narayanan's are - GM Nihal Sarin and Woman International Master (WIM) Divya Deshmukh.
Interestingly, Praggnanandhaa and Deshmukh have been ranked as the best performers for board 5 and 6 respectively during their Pool A outing. While Praggnanandhaa won all his five games, Deshmukh had won four out of five games. The one game loss was due to net connectivity issues.
Be that as it may, what was also interesting is that both the coaches quit their active playing career to turn into coaches for their love of sharing their knowledge.
