Chess Olympiad 2026 opens in Samarkand: India defend their double gold

Two sheets of paper submitted before the first move are the most interesting thing about Samarkand. Each carries four names in a fixed order, signed and sealed before the first clock is pressed. India handed in one sheet, Thailand another, and from that moment nobody may switch boards or hide a strongest player lower down to deceive the opponent. I once loaded the wrong SHB Da Nang tape, and that taught me football does not forgive carelessness. Team chess does not forgive either; the only difference is that a single wrong line in the board-order sheet makes a team pay for eleven rounds.

This year's event is the 46th Chess Olympiad, organised by the International Chess Federation (FIDE) at the Silk Road International Exhibition Centre in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The first official Olympiad was held in London in 2026, and the title has since been treated as FIDE's team championship. The Open section brings together 207 countries, the Women's section 191, placing Samarkand among the largest Olympiads in the history of the sport.

India begin on Wednesday. The Open team faces Thailand, the Women's team faces the Dominican Republic. They arrive as defending champions in both sections, following the historic double gold in Budapest in 2026. For a nation that waited a long time to reach the top, defending two titles at once is a different problem from winning them. A challenger needs one burst of form. A champion needs eleven rounds without a single flat one.

Each country registers five players, but only four play in a given match, with one reserve. A team match is four individual games. The format is an 11-round Swiss system, in which teams on similar scores are paired together, no team is eliminated, and everyone plays all eleven rounds.

Scoring is what sets the Olympiad apart from other team events. A match win is worth two match points. A 2-2 draw gives each team one. A loss gives nothing. A 4-0 win counts exactly the same as a 2.5-1.5 win. The champion is decided by matches won, not by total individual games won. Newcomers to chess often miss this and are surprised when a team that won three individual games still drops out of the title race.

Board order is the part I enjoy dissecting most, and the part young Vietnamese coaches ask me about most. Before the tournament begins, every country must submit a fixed order for its four players, and that order cannot change between rounds. Usually the strongest player is on board 1, the second strongest on board 2, and so on. Playing board 1 carries both honour and risk. It means facing the strongest player of every opposing team. Lower boards tend to meet lighter opposition, and that is where points are quietly harvested. Captains therefore sometimes make strategic choices about where to place their strongest player rather than defaulting him to board 1.

Following the Budapest 2026 team matches on screen, I logged every board pairing and found something cold: the teams that went deep had solid third and fourth boards, not necessarily the strongest single player in the event. Board 1 decides honour; boards 3 and 4 decide the qualifying places. A team with a star on board 1 but loose lower boards draws more than it wins, and in this format drawing too much is fatal.

The counter-intuitive angle is this: a fixed board order does not create fairness, it creates transparency, and transparency has a price. Once the sheet is in, the opposing staff holds four specific targets and can prepare opening files for each of them. The defending champion suffers more than the challenger, because the challenger prepares for one match while the champion must prepare for eleven rounds against eleven different dossiers.

Many still believe the number one player must sit on board 1. That choice feels comfortable, yet it turns the strongest player into the biggest consumer of energy. He meets the toughest opposition every round while the points that decide the standings are collected further down. In football, the transfer market resembles a rook-and-pawn endgame: whoever reads the role first breathes easy. The same applies here. Over eleven rounds, reading board 3 correctly matters more than owning a famous name on board 1.

During the COVID season, sitting in an empty stadium, I could hear the system breathing. Team chess breathes the same way; the difference is that its breathing sits in the board order submitted before the first move. A wrong tape early in life is the most expensive lesson: the eye always needs verification. In chess, what needs verification is each player's position on the order sheet, not his reputation.

Back to India. The double gold in Budapest 2026 put them among a very small group of nations that have won both sections at a single Olympiad. Their strength lies in depth: a squad in which even the reserve could play board 1 for most other countries. But depth only pays when the captain dares to use it, and that is what I will watch closely in the first two rounds. The reserve slot is peculiar in this format: a country registers five players, but only four play in a match. The reserve is not decoration. He is the card that changes the entire character of a team match, especially in the middle rounds when the schedule tightens.

The opening round against Thailand and the Dominican Republic is unlikely to produce surprises. What matters arrives in rounds five and six, when the Swiss system starts collecting teams on equal scores, and in rounds ten and eleven, when a single draw can erase ten rounds of accumulation. Anyone wanting to know whether India defend their crown should look at their board 3 and board 4, not at the individual score of their number one. At the Olympiad, the champion is the team that knows which board must deliver before it knows who the opponent is.