It's not like if a 800 is playing the KID that I would smack them across the face and send them to their room without dinner. I still would not recommend those two defenses to a player under 1000 personally because those openings are a little too advanced and probably best suited for a 1200-1300 who can navigate imbalanced pawn structures and understand what side of the board to play on. Those two defenses still at least challenge the center because the pawn on c5 and the knight on f6 still exert control of central squares in ways that 1.g3 and 1.b4 do not. In the screen shot I shared, the Sicilian and KID are in the top 2 tiers and are obviously solid in all levels of chess. You can obviously play the game however you like and use whatever opening that you want and you'll be just fine, but if you have the goals of 1) obtaining consistent results and 2) improving general chess understanding/positional knowledge, then playing one of the 4 main first moves as white is the way to go about it in my opinion. My advise was for the white side of the board because that's what he was asking an opinion for. The intrigue around how disconnections were adjudicated is the ONLY reason this is "news" at all. The fact that the FIDE president still called it an "official" olympiad was a joke. Essentially - no one who cares about chess cared about what outcome this tournament would have before it began. it was a rapid tournament with very unique constraints around who was eligible to make up the team. The format was not bring your X best players and duke it out. This was NOT a real olympiad, just being done online. That said, I still don't think anything insidious is going on here at all. Note the consistent thread of how disconnections were handled in both the India-Armenia match and the India-Russia match is India. Moreover, if it even was political, I assure you it would be to appease India, one of the biggest and fastest growing markets for chess in the world, and not to downplay Armenia. However, I highly doubt it is anything this political and insidious. FIDE being incompetent and/or corrupt would be absolutely nothing new.
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