MALAYSIA IN OLYMPIAD (NICE 1974)

Nice, a beautiful city in southern France, believe to be among the oldest human settlements in the world, is also the host for 1974 Chess Olympiad.

Format
It still continue to use the format of dividing teams to smaller group. Top 2 teams from each group will played in Group A, next 2 teams in Group B and so on.

Malaysian Team

Malaysia was represented, according to board order

1. Chan Mun Fye
2. Foo Lum Choon
3. Choo Min Wang
4. Karim Wahid
5. Jamaluddin
6. Bernard Ng

Malaysia did not send a woman team.

Compare with previous Olympiad (Skopje 1972), we can see that 4 players made their Olympiad debut (Choo, Karim, Jamaluddin, Bernard) and there is a swap in top two board.

We were placed in Group 4 and finished number 8 from 10 teams. (1.Hungary 2.Spain 3. Belgium 4.Tunisia 5.Chile 6.Syria 7.Malta 8.Malaysia 9.Japan 10.Nicaragua).

We qualified to play in Group D and finished at number 12 from 16 teams.We again finished at number 59 but this time around, out of 73 teams! An improvement!

Top 5 and Asean (neighbours) finisher were as below.

1. Soviet Union (Karpov, Korchnoi, Spassky, Petrosian, Tal, Kuzmin) 4 of them is World Champ!
2. Yugoslavia (Gligoric, Ljubojevic, Ivkov, Planinc, Velimirovic, Parma)
3. United States (Kavalek, Byrne, Browne, Reshevsky, Lombardy, Tarjan)
4. Bulgaria (Radulov, Padevsky, Tringov, Popov, Spasov, Kirov)
5. Netherlands (Timman, Donner, Sosonko, Ree, Enklaar, Kuijpers)

11.The Philippines (Torre, Cardoso, Naranja, Balinas, Lontoc, Bordonada)

39.Indonesia (Ardiansyah, Sampouw, Suwuh, Bessaria, Sinulingga, Damanik)

43.Singapore (Pang, Leow, Lee, Choong, Lim Kok Ann, Chia)

59.Malaysia

Individual Performance

1. Chan Mun Fye (5.5/19) P=2095
2. Foo Lum Choon (4.5/18 P=2020
3. Choo Min Wang (8.5/18) P=2221
4. Karim Wahid (7.5/16) P=2204
5. Jamaluddin (2/6) P=2143
6. Bernard Ng (3/11) P=2959 (Typo:2059 actually.)

P=ELO Performance

Trivia

1. Chan Mun Fye, hero of previous Skopje Olympiad, scored 5 losses in a row before managed to registered a win against Japan.
2. Foo Lum Choon, first board Skopje Olympiad, fared even worst, 7 losses in a row before drawing his game against Guernsey.
3. Choo Min Wang is the hero for Malaysia team (8.5 out of 18 games) or about 27% of points collected by Malaysia team.
4. Karim Wahid, draw master, drawing 9 out of 16 games.
5. Overall, Malaysia's ELO performance is at 2126. In Skopje it is 2098. Improvement!

Next stop.

1978 Buenos Aires (Malaysia did not send a team to 1976 Haifa Olympiad)