According to a story on ChessBase the #1 player in Cuba, Lenier Dominguez, (2739 FIDE) has applied for political asylum in the US. It looks like we just found our fourth board for the next Olympiad.
Wouldn’t he have to wait until 2020 (2019 to change federation)?
Even then, my take on it is that the competition for the fourth board is going to be pretty fierce. Both Robson and Shankland are still relatively young/improving players, and you have plenty of even younger players (Xiong, for example) that are also likely to be in the mix. That said, any 2700+ rated FIDE player is more than welcome - and likely to be a strong addition to the US chess scene.
I can’t find this on Chessbase, or any hits on Google. Can you post a link?
-Matt
Here’s the link:
en.chessbase.com/post/russian-te … s-his-team
The mention of Dominguez defecting is in the text following the annotated Najer-Mamedyarov game. It does say that this information comes from “some Russian chess internet source”, so caveat emptor.
Any updates on this?
Not that I have heard. Maybe someone better connected in US Chess knows something?