India, Russia Share Trophy After Tech Failure At Online Chess Olympiad indianexpress.com

A server outage resulted in India and Russia sharing the trophy in the FIDE online Chess Olympiad on Sunday. Nihal Sarin and Divya Deshmukh were initially deemed to have lost their matches on the basis of time running out, after the internet connection faltered. Both Indians were holding good positions in their contests. However, a little while later, the International Chess Federation decreed that the two teams be declared joint winners.

The eventual decision came as a relief to the Indians, because when the server crashed and the screens went still, panic had set in amidst the contingent, scattered across different parts of the country. “I did not know what was happening. No one knew how to deal with the situation,” non-playing skipper Narayanan Srinath told official website chessbase.com in the post-match interview before the final verdict had been announced.