MALAYSIA IN OLYMPIAD (BUENOS AIRES 1978)

Buenos Aires (English translation:Good Air) is a metropolitan city of the Rio de la Plata River. Buenos Aires is the host for 1978 Chess Olympiad.

4 years has passed since Malaysia last sending its team to Olympiad (We did not send a team to 1976 Haifa Olympiad). Fischer no longer World Champion. Karpov is. Format of the tournament has also been change. No more smaller group two tiered event. It is now 14 round Swiss event.

Malaysian Team
Malaysia was represented, according to the board order.
1.Tan Bian Huat
2.Woo Beng Keong
3.Christie Hon
4.Jimmy Liew
5.Foo Lum Choon
6.Laurence How

Malaysia did not send a woman team.

We can see that only Foo Lum Choon is the only 'veteran' player in the team with his 3rd Olympiad outings. The other five players are Olympiad virgins (Bian Huat, WBK, Christie, Jimmy and Laurence) and made their Olympiad debut here. All in all, we send a young team.

How did they perform? Well, not bad.

Let's look at the top 5 placing and Asean placings.
1.Hungary (Portisch, Ribli, Sax, Adorjan, Csom, Vadasz)
2.Soviet Union (Spassky, Petrosian, Polugaevsky, Gulko, Romanishin, Vaganian)
3.United States (Kavalek, Browne, Lein, Byrne, Tarjan, Lombardy)
4.West Germany (Hubner, Unzicker, Pfleger, Darga, Hecht, Otto)
5.Israel (Dzindzichashvilli,Liberzon, Kagan, Bleiman, Birnboim, Grunfeld)

24.The Philippines (Torre, Rodriguez, Mascarinas, Bordonada, Vic Torre, De Guzman)
26.Indonesia (Suradiraja, Ardiansyah, Bachtiar, Wotulo, Sampouw, Kileng)
57.Malaysia

Singapore did not send their team.

Rank wise, Malaysia shown an improvement from previous 1974 Nice outing (57 from previously 59) though worth mentioning is this edition have only 65 teams compared with Nice's 73)

Players Performance
1.Tan Bian Huat (5/12) P=2144
2.Woo Beng Keong (3/12) P=1992
3.Christie Hon (6.5/13) P=2168
4.Jimmy Liew (8/12) P=2217
5.Foo Lum Choon (2.5/7) P=unavailable
6.Laurence How (Did not play)

P=ELO Performance

Trivia
1. Jimmy Liew is the hero for Malaysian Team (8/12=67%), against the average opponent's of 2410 (highest among all Malaysian players) and contributing at about 34% of points collected by Malaysian team.
2.So far this is the outing in which Malaysia did not being beaten 4-0 though we also did not score any 4-0 win.
3.All Malaysian players did not have any Fide rating, hence we are rated 2200.
4. Woo Beng Keong scored his first win on his 12th game (Olympiad's last round) against UAE team.
5. Elo performance wise, Malaysian performance dropped slightly at 2108, compared woth Nice's 2126.

Next stop
1980 La Valletta