Brazil's round 4 opponents at the Chess Olympiad: how Iraq and Albania play

Short answer

In round 4 of the 46th Chess Olympiad, on 19 September 2026, Brazil faced Iraq in the open section and Albania in the women's section, and won both matches: 2.5-1.5 and 4-0. Using the classical games broadcast on Lichess over the last three years, this report shows each opponent's repertoire, the lines where each scores below their own average and where the engine finds the most mistakes, always with the sample size alongside.

Event: 46th FIDE Chess Olympiad

How this was compiled: Checked on 19 September 2026, with round 4 already finished: it started at 10:15 UTC. Collection of the classical games ended at 14:07 UTC and the error profiles were measured from 21:50 UTC. Pairings checked on Chess-Results; line-ups, ratings and titles from the official PGN broadcast on Lichess. The repertoire uses over-the-board classical games from the last three years broadcast on Lichess, matched to each player by FIDE ID and excluding round 4 itself: 3, 54, 54 and 23 games for the four Iraqis in the line-up and 76, 49, 12 and 38 for the four Albanians. Error profiles measured with Stockfish 19 at depth 16 on each player's 12 most recent classical games. Online accounts are not included in this version. Chiya mder hamad, with 3 games in the sample, is left out of the weak lines and of the error profile. Final round 4 scores checked against the official PGN at 22:35 UTC.

The essentials in a few lines

• In round 4 of the Samarkand Olympiad, on 19 September 2026, Brazil beat Iraq 2.5-1.5 in the open section and Albania 4-0 in the women's section.
• Iraq drew three games while 271 to 296 rating points down on each of the bottom three boards, and lost only on board 1, where the gap was 599.
• The only weak line with a usable sample on the Iraqi side is Zozek Salah Mohammed's King's Indian: 38% in 4 games, against 63% for his own White average. Alexandr Fier answered 1.d4 with 1...d5 and drew.
• Against Fier, Zozek went into the Queen's Gambit, a line that appears in 2 of his 10 games after 1.d4 d5 — in the other 8 he played 2.Nf3.
• In the women's section, Eklea Omeri scored 27% in 11 games with Black against 1.e4, and Kathie Librelato won with exactly that move.
• All figures are from the opponent's point of view and show tendencies: samples range from 3 to 76 games, and error profiles use 12 games per player.

Round 4 at a glance

Brazil were higher rated on all eight boards, and on seven of them by a wide margin: 271 to 599 points in the open section, 98 to 317 on the top three boards of the women's section. The only close pairing was women's board 1, where Clara Dias, playing her first game of this Olympiad, was 15 points above Klean Shuqja.

The sample column says how much of the dossier holds up. Chiya mder hamad, Iraq's board 1, has 3 broadcast classical games, all from September 2026: about him the dossier says nothing beyond that. The other three Iraqis in the line-up have between 23 and 54, and the four Albanians between 12 and 76.

It is worth noting who sat out. Iraq rested Ali Ehsan Aryan, who has the largest sample of the team at 37 games. Albania kept three players from the previous rounds and swapped Ailin Ndreko for Eklea Omeri, who until then had played only round 3.

Iraq: three draws and a single usable weak line

Zozek Salah Mohammed, board 2, is the most predictable opponent of the team on move one and the least predictable on move two. He opened 1.d4 in 25 of 27 games with White, but what follows depends on what he gets: against 1...d5 he played 2.Nf3 in 8 of 10 games and 2.c4 in only 2. The line where he scores below his average is the King's Indian, 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6: 38% in 4 games, against 63% for his own White average. Four games, and the dossier marks the confidence as low.

Ali Layth Ahmed Alothman, board 3, plays like two different players depending on colour. With White he scored 78% in 25 games, with 17 wins, 5 draws and 3 losses, opening 1.Nf3 in 22 of them. With Black he drops to 52% in 29. It is against 1.e4 that he appears most — 14 games, 57% — and the lines where he suffers are Caro-Kann: 17% in 3 games after 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 and 25% in 4 in the Advance Variation. All of them with three or four games.

Dhahir Habeeb Muazaz, board 4, has the narrowest repertoire in the sample: 1.Nf3 in all 12 games with White, with 5 wins, 6 draws and one loss. With Black he scored 64% in 11. That is 23 games in total, all since December 2025 — a short sample, but above the low-confidence threshold.

Chiya mder hamad, board 1, has 3 broadcast classical games, all from this September. No weak lines, game plan or error profile are published for him: with three games, any percentage is noise. Ali Ehsan Aryan, who played the first three rounds and rested in this one, has the largest sample of the team at 37 games, and scores 69% with White against 55% with Black.

Albania: where the dossier and the scoreboard agreed

Klean Shuqja, board 1 and the largest sample of the team at 76 games, is 1.e4 without exception: all 39 games with White start that way, and all 16 Sicilians continued 2.Nf3. With Black she sits at 43%, and against 1.e4 she drops to 31% in 16 games — the lowest figure in the Albanian dossier with a sample worth the name.

Kler Caku, board 2, has the opposite shape: 53% with White in 29 games and 58% with Black in 20. Against 1.e4 she answers 1...e5 in all 12 games of the sample and reaches the Ruy Lopez in 8, always through the same door — 3...a6 4.Ba4 Nf6. As White, the line where she scores least is the Sicilian with 2...e6: 25% in 6 games, against her own 53% average.

Eklea Omeri, board 4, is the opponent the dossier describes most sharply. With Black she scored 31% in 21 games, and against 1.e4 that becomes 27% in 11, with 3 wins, no draws and 8 losses. Against 1.d4, answering 1...Nf6 gave her 8% in 6 games. With White she rises to 44% in 17.

Eglantina Shabanaj, board 3, has 12 games in the sample and only 4 with White. That is too little for a weak line, and the dossier publishes none. What it does record is the first move: in her 8 games with Black she faced 1.d4 in 6, scoring 42%.

Where the engine finds the mistakes

The table shows the average loss per move, the ACPL, in each phase. In the opening everyone sits between 6 and 12 centipawns, which says more about preparation and theory than about play. The difference shows up later.

With 12 games per player, ACPL is good for comparing the phases of one player, not for ranking players against each other. A five-centipawn gap between two names in the table supports no conclusion at all. Alothman's case does support one: 54 centipawns per move in the middlegame, over 243 measured moves, against 17 in the endgame, over 167. That is the reverse of the usual pattern, where the errors grow with fatigue and with the clock.

On the Albanian side, Eklea Omeri has the two worst figures in the table, 63 in the middlegame and 40 in the endgame, and she was the one who lost to Kathie Librelato. Klean Shuqja has the opposite shape to Alothman's: 27 in the middlegame and 36 in the endgame, over 151 measured endgame moves.

Chiya mder hamad is left out of the table. His error profile exists, but it was measured over the three games he has in the sample, and three games describe nobody. The blunder count is also left out: when a player who is already winning picks a slower mate, the blunder rule records a huge loss for a move that changes nothing. ACPL caps each evaluation at a thousand centipawns and does not suffer from that.

What round 4 showed

The open section finished 2.5-1.5 to Brazil, with three draws and Supi's win on board 1. The three draws came from the boards where Iraq was between 271 and 296 rating points down, and none of them went through a known weak line. Against Fier, Zozek chose the Queen's Gambit — 2.c4 instead of the 2.Nf3 he played in 8 of his 10 games after 1.d4 d5 — and the game was drawn after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Nf3 dxc4.

Diamant's board is the clearest case. He opened 1.c4 against Alothman, who in his 29 games with Black faced 1.e4 in 14, 1.d4 in 10 and 1.Nf3 in 4 — 1.c4, none. The dossier had nothing to say about the position after move four, and the board finished level on both counts: no weak line entered, and a draw.

In the women's section the 4-0 came with three of the four Brazilians playing against the statistics and winning anyway. Klean Shuqja, who had answered the Sicilian with 2.Nf3 in all 16 games of the sample, played 2.c3 against Clara Dias and lost. Kler Caku, who always reached 4.Ba4 Nf6 in the Ruy Lopez, went into the Norwegian with 4...b5 5.Bb3 Na5 and lost to Juliana Terao. Julia Alboredo met Eglantina Shabanaj's Colle System, drawn from a White sample of four games, and won.

Librelato is the exception. She opened 1.e4 against Eklea Omeri — exactly the situation in which Omeri scored 27% in 11 games — got the Caro-Kann and answered 2.Nc3, the same second move with which she had beaten Jovanka Houska in round 3. It is the only board of the round where the Brazilian choice and the dossier pointed the same way, and the result followed. One coincidence in eight boards proves no method: the dossier says where the opponent scores less, not what the Brazilian plays well, and the two only meet when the line suits both.

Frequently asked questions

Update log

• 2026-09-19 — First published after round 4 finished: repertoire from the classical games broadcast on Lichess, error profiles with Stockfish 19 at depth 16, and final scores checked against the official PGN.
• 2026-09-29 — The Olympiad ended on 27 September: Uzbekistan won the open and China the women's event. This coverage is no longer updated; the final result is in the standings story.

Sources

• 46th FIDE Chess Olympiad Samarkand 2026 | Open — round 4, matches 38-62 (PGN with line-ups) — Lichess
• 46th FIDE Chess Olympiad Samarkand 2026 | Women — round 4, matches 26-50 (PGN with line-ups) — Lichess
• Zozek Salah Mohammed — broadcasts under FIDE ID 4803361 — Lichess
• 46th Chess Olympiad Samarkand 2026, Open — round 4 pairings — Chess-Results

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