June 12, 2023

Team USA Brings Home the Bronze

Please join me in a belated celebration of Team USA’s accomplishment in the 21^st ICCF Olympiad. ICCF posted the final results on March 25 and your webmaster, in a senior moment, thought he had posted this remarkable result. So belatedly, the red headline is to celebrate a red letter day for our talented team.! After more than three years of play the US team finished in a tie for second place in the world on a plus 2 score, taking Bronze on tiebreaks, behind Luxembourg and ahead of Austria.

Now to recognize the players (all GM’s) that made up that team:

1. Stephen E. Ham (tie for 1^st)

2. Daniel M. Fleetwood (tie for 3^rd)

3. Tim Murray (tie for 1^st on +1)

4. Jon Ostriker (tie for 4^th)

5. Jason Bokar (tie for 4^th on +1)

6. Jon Edwards (tie for 4^th)

Hearty congratulations to all six for not dropping a single game against extremely strong competition and special kudos to Tim and Jason for bringing home the two wins that earned the medal! And if you have any doubts about the strength of this crew, notice that the current World Champion is playing on 6^th board.

Watch Chess Life for their coverage as they are currently soliciting our team for input to an upcoming article. It should be noted that this run to our first Olympiad medal since the 14^th Olympiad started in September of 2016 with a preliminaries team consisting of Dan Perry, Carl Siefring, Wieland Belka, Kenneth Reinhart, Wilbur Tseng and Kristo Miettinen who placed first in their section to qualify the US for a berth in the Finals.