The biggest event in Chess 2018 was undoubtedly the OlympiadThe Chess Olympiad is a biennial chess tournament in which teams from all over the world compete. 2018's edition featured most of the top players in the world as well as many up and coming super talents and prodigies. The Olympiad is known for special performances by players and teams who rise to the occasion and exceed everyone’s expectations, including their own. The 2018 edition was no exception. In the end China won both the Open and Women’s section due to their better tie-break scores. But, there were many great upsets and many incredible games played along the way. And, it was an exciting race to the end.
Geert thought it would be a fun service to the Chess(able) community to create a living, breathing, trainable chess tactics document of the tournament while it happened.
During the tournament he worked night and day, playing through thousands of games, reading news articles and reports, and checking players and coaches’ social media, to try to find remarkable, instructive or simple and elegant tactics. Since, he started putting the puzzles on Chessable, the collection has grown to a nice variety of over 110 puzzles; at least 10 puzzles for each of the 11 rounds.
I have merely attempted to make a collection that will engage and inspire. I’m thankful for the overwhelmingly positive response thus far by players, coaches, chess enthusiasts and even some FM, IM and GM’s for their input to make this free course a great resource for training. It truly is a course by the community for the community.
Now, because of the sheer volume of games being played every round (over 700) and the high level of competition surely some great moments were missed. But who’s to say what’s best. Sometimes a simple tactic can be elegant in its simplicity.
Geert did a lot of additional work with the annotation, adding over 12,000 words of instruction, background stories, and analysis of these key tactical moments.
Since the publication of this free course in 2018, Geert managed to increase his online rating from 1700 to a peak rating of over 2200 online, AND in October of 2021 he became the CEO of Chessable. Just goes to show that it really pays to study your tactics, kids!
