Canada's round 4 opponents at the Chess Olympiad: how Kosovo and Bolivia play

Short answer

In round 4 of the 46th Chess Olympiad, on 19 September 2026, Canada beat Kosovo 3-1 in the open section and drew 2-2 with Bolivia in the women's section. 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 14:51 UTC and the error profiles were measured from 22:24 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: 62, 41 and 73 games for three of the four Kosovars in the line-up, and none for the fourth and 47, 56, 22 and 37 for the four Bolivians. 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. Bardh Avdiu has no broadcast classical game in the window, so he has no repertoire and no 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, Canada beat Kosovo 3-1 on match 32 of the open section and drew 2-2 with Bolivia on match 21 of the women's section.
• Korab Saraci scores 54% with 1.e4 in 26 games and 21% with 1.d4 in 7. He opened 1.d4 against Razvan Preotu and lost.
• Bardh Avdiu, Kosovo's board 4, has no broadcast classical games in the three-year window: the dossier on him is empty, and the text says so instead of guessing.
• Nderim Saraci had drawn all three games in the sample after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6. Shawn Rodrigue-Lemieux reached the same position and drew the fourth.
• Bolivia's Nicole Mollo Figueroa is the strongest opponent by results of the round: 72% with White in 23 games and 77% with Black in 24.
• All figures are from the opponent's point of view and show tendencies: samples range from zero to 73 games, and error profiles use 12 games per player.

Round 4 at a glance

The two matches had opposite shapes. In the open section Canada were higher rated on every board, from 83 points on board 1 to 297 on board 4, and won 3-1. In the women's section the margins were smaller — 150, 274 and 139 points on the first three boards — and on board 4 Hanxi Jiang was the lower rated player of the pair, by 19 points. That match finished 2-2.

The sample column has the widest spread the series has produced. Korab Saraci has 73 broadcast classical games, Nderim Saraci 62, Endrit Uruci 41 — and Bardh Avdiu, Kosovo's board 4, has none at all. On the Bolivian side the four players in the line-up have between 22 and 56.

An empty dossier deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the most common thing a scouting report finds outside the top boards. Avdiu played his first game of this Olympiad in round 4, and no classical game of his appears in three years of Lichess broadcasts. There is nothing to publish about how he plays, and inventing a tendency from a rating would be worse than saying nothing.

Kosovo: the first move that costs 33 points

Korab Saraci, board 3, has the clearest number of the round, and it sits on the first move. In 36 games with White he opened 1.e4 in 26, scoring 54%, and 1.d4 in 7, scoring 21% — one win, one draw, five losses. The weak line the dossier extracts from those seven is the Slav, 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6, at 38% in 4 games, but the more useful figure is the one above it: with this player, the choice of first move is worth more than the choice of variation.

Nderim Saraci, board 1 and the highest rated of the four, is the opposite kind of profile: 67% with White in 29 games, 55% with Black in 33, and no weak line above five games in either colour. What the sample does show is a habit. After 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 he has three games, and all three were drawn.

Endrit Uruci, board 2, is the only opponent in this round who scores better with Black than with White: 57% in 22 games against 47% in 19. The line where he sinks is the Sicilian with 2...e6, where he scored 0% in 3 games as White. Against 1.d4 he has only six games with Black, which is why the dossier says nothing about how he meets it.

Bardh Avdiu, board 4, has no classical game in three years of broadcasts. Muhamet Asllani, the Kosovar who played the first three rounds and rested in this one, has 51 games and the weakest White score of the team at 45%, including 29% in 7 games of the Open Sicilian with 3.d4.

Bolivia: the team the ratings underestimated

Nicole Mollo Figueroa, board 1, is the best-performing opponent of this round by some distance: 72% with White in 23 games and 77% with Black in 24, which is a higher score with the black pieces than any of the other seven opponents managed with either colour. She opens 1.d4 in 21 of 23 games, and the one line where she drops is 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3, at 33% in 3 games.

Gloria Luz Yepez Montenegro, board 2, is the reverse: 59% with White in 28 games and 41% with Black in 28. With White she opened 1.d4 in all 28, and the line where she drops is the Exchange Queen's Gambit with 3.Nc3, at 42% in 6 games. With Black she met 1.e4 in 17 games and 1.d4 in 7, and it is against 1.d4 that the sample collapses: 21% in those 7, and 10% in the 5 that reached 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6, with no win and one draw.

Jessica Molina, board 3, has the smallest sample of the Bolivian line-up at 22 games, and the best White score of the round: 85% in 10 games, with 8 wins. She opened 1.d4 in 9 of those 10 and reached the London System in 4, winning all four. With Black she plays the Caro-Kann and scores 67% in 12 games.

Daniela Cordero, board 4, is the one the dossier marks as vulnerable: 36% with Black in 21 games against 59% with White in 16. Against 1.d4 she has six games with 25%, and the three in which she answered 1...e6 gave her 17%. Jhoana Velarde Alarcon, who rested, has 28 games and scores 12% in the 4 French Defences she faced as White.

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 7 and 10 centipawns, which says more about preparation and theory than about play. The difference shows up later.

Korab Saraci's case is worth reading next to the previous section. He is the Kosovar player who loses least per move — 18 centipawns overall, 25 in the middlegame and 14 in the endgame — and the only one of the four who lost his game. Accuracy per move and opening choice are different things, and his game went wrong at move one: 1.d4, which the sample scores at 21% in 7 games.

With 12 games per player, ACPL is good for comparing the phases of one player, not for ranking players against each other. Daniela Cordero's 60 centipawns in the endgame is the highest figure in the table, but it comes from 82 measured endgame moves — too few to describe a tendency, and fewer still to explain the game she won. Gloria Yepez has 41 in the same column over 132 moves, and Muhamet Asllani 40 over 194.

The blunder count is 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 went 3-1 to Canada. On board 3, Korab Saraci opened 1.d4 — the move he had played in 7 of 36 games with White, scoring 21% — and Razvan Preotu answered with the Slav, the exact line at 38% in 4 games, and won. On board 1, Nderim Saraci got 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 against Shawn Rodrigue-Lemieux, the position his sample contained three times, all drawn, and the fourth was drawn too. Two boards, two confirmations, and neither of them worth more than the samples behind it.

On board 4, Nikolay Noritsyn beat Bardh Avdiu in a Petrov after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Nc3. There was no dossier at all to work from — no games, no repertoire, no error profile — which is a reminder of what the series is actually measuring. Preparation against an opponent with no public games is preparation against nobody in particular, and it is how most games in most tournaments are played.

The women's match is where the dossier was least useful, and the honest thing is to say why. Yunshan Li steered Gloria Yepez into 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6, where Yepez had scored 10% in 5 games, and the game was drawn. Hanxi Jiang played 1.d4 against Daniela Cordero, who had 25% in 6 games there, got the Dutch after 1...e6 2.c4 f5 — the move order in which Cordero had 17% in 3 games — and lost. Two entries into a weak line produced half a point out of two.

This is the part worth keeping. A weak line with three, five or six games is a hint about the past, not a prediction about the next game; the dossier prints the sample size next to every percentage precisely so that a 17% in 3 games is read as what it is. Jessica Molina makes the same point from the other side: with an 85% White score in the sample and 1.d4 in 9 of her 10 games, she opened 1.f4 against Oksana Golubeva, a move that appears in none of them, and lost. Players are allowed to do what they have never done, and a dossier is the list of what they have done.

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 13-37 (PGN with line-ups) — Lichess
• 46th FIDE Chess Olympiad Samarkand 2026 | Women — round 4, matches 26-50 (PGN with line-ups) — Lichess
• Korab Saraci — broadcasts under FIDE ID 4701968 — Lichess
• 46th Chess Olympiad Samarkand 2026, Open — round 4 pairings — Chess-Results

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