[7] The tournament featured eight out of the top ten players from the FIDE rating list published in August 2016; only former World Champion Viswanathan Anand and Levon Aronian were missing the Olympiad.

The United States were the second strongest team with three top ten players, Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura and Wesley So, along with Ray Robson and Samuel Shankland.

The event was broadcast from a media centre near the playing hall that consisted of working stations and information area equipped with clearly marked notice boards for news and results service.

Norway showed signs of frailty after conceding two draws against Wales to win 3–1, while Serbia beat Trinidad and Tobago by the same margin following GM Nikola Sedlak's upset loss to Kevin Cupid.

Several teams were unable to field the required three players and forfeited all four games; these were Malawi, Cameroon, Mali, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi, Senegal, Gambia, Congo, Djibouti, Lesotho and Mexico (who thereby lost to the much lower-rated Ivory Coast).

Teams who had informed the organizers that their players had not arrived were not paired; these were Angola, Madagascar, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Seychelles, Eritrea, and Central African Republic.

A few teams arrived with only three players, gifting their opponents a point; Russia's fourth board Alexander Grischuk won in this fashion against Nigeria, as did Spain's David Antón Guijarro against Syria.

[18] There was a number of stiff matches with closer fight and more balanced opposition in the second round, although top seeded teams continued scoring high victories.

England faced difficulties in narrowly beating Indonesia 2½-1½ after Luke McShane lost to Irwanto Sadikin and Michael Adams drew his 166-move game against Muhammad Lutfi Ali.

[21][22] It was also the round in which the top four players on the FIDE rating list make their debut: Magnus Carlsen, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Fabiano Caruana and Vladimir Kramnik.

[32] Nevertheless, the result was not standing for long, because Andrei Volokitin defeated Alexander Grischuk, who spent more than an hour on moves 10–12, in a rook endgame with three strong connected pawns on the e-g files.

The winless day for the strong players was completed with Maxime Vachier-Lagrave who played a game that he could not win against Ioannis Papaioannou in the 2–2 draw with Greece, while Veselin Topalov was beaten by Baadur Jobava in Bulgaria's 3–1 loss to Georgia.

France's Maxime Vachier-Lagrave scored his first win at the Olympiad after three draws but his team suffered a 2½-1½ loss from Paraguay as Sébastien Mazé and Romain Édouard both lost.

[41] In a game that was opened with the Berlin Defence of the Ruy Lopez with Steinitz's 4. d3, Duda came with an original idea on the move 11, which allowed him to develop a strong play with his rooks on the c-file and later sacrifice an exchange on c6 to get a winning position.

After three draws, the only decisive game was played on the second board, where Baskaran Adhiban beat Erwin l'Ami with the Black pieces after the Dutch blundered an important pawn on the move 36 and put himself in a lost endgame (see diagram).

Similarly to the match between India and the Netherlands, there was only one decisive game played on the first board, where Fabiano Caruana silently outplayed Pavel Eljanov in a position that seemed equal but later transposed into a winning endgame with a passed a-pawn.

Arkadij Naiditsch had a good start of the tournament with four wins but suffered his second loss in a row in the game against Athanasios Mastrovasilis after losing track of the complications that occurred in an old line of the Benoni Defence.

[52] Fridman opted for the Petrov's Defence in his game against Nepomniachtchi and played well until the time control but then he went for a passive set-up with his pieces and allowed the Russian to win the endgame.

[49] The seventh round was marked with the high 3½-½ victories of the top two seeds Russia and the United States against the Czech Republic and the only team with a perfect score and sole leader in the standings India, respectively.

The match between Azerbaijan and Croatia ended in a 3½-½ victory for the host team with full points scored by Teimour Radjabov, Rauf Mamedov and Eltaj Safarli.

On board three, Wesley So obtained a nearly decisive advantage with the Black pieces in the opening, which he later converted into a win against Ian Nepomniachtchi who had won all seven games previously played at the Olympiad.

[67][65] The highest rated host team Azerbaijan snatched a 2½-1½ victory in their match against Latvia with Eltaj Safarli beating Nikita Meskovs on the last board.

On the top board, the match hosted the encounter between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana in which the World champion surprised his opponent by opening the game with the Scandinavian Defence.

[73] On the other tables, Russia defeated the strongest team of the host Azerbaijan by 3-1 thanks to the wins by Vladimir Kramnik and Alexander Grischuk both with the White pieces over Teimour Radjabov and Arkadij Naiditsch, respectively.

Sam Shankland was the first to score a full point after beating Tornike Sanikidze with the White pieces in a game in which he played a novelty on move 16 that allowed him to quickly win a pawn and get rid of his bad bishop at the same time (see diagram).

On board two, however, Hikaru Nakamura lost with the White pieces to Mikheil Mchedlishvili as a result of a bad move played in the opening that did not give him a chance to bounce back into the game.

[83] England narrowly beat Azerbaijan 2½-1½ with wins by Gawain Jones and Nigel Short against Arkadij Naiditsch and Eltaj Safarli, respectively; Rauf Mamedov defeated David Howell to score the only full point for the Azeri team, while Michael Adams and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov drew their game.

Norway, led by the World champion Magnus Carlsen, ended the tournament in fifth place, which is their best result ever at the Chess Olympiads; they had only finished in the top 20 on one previous occasion.

Peter Svidler called his achievement "frankly beyond belief" and said of him: I wanted to speak a little about people who impressed the most, and somehow I kept on ignoring his performances in my previous two banters during this Olympiad, which is ridiculous, but I think pride of place goes to Eugenio Torre.

Andrei Volokitin as a reserve player had the best performance of all players in the tournament:[90] Grandmaster norms were achieved by Yusup Atabayev (Turkmenistan), Nicola Capone (Belgium), Bogdan-Danil Deac (Romania), Marian Jurcik (Slovakia), Shahin Lorparizangeneh (Iran), Parham Maghsoodloo (Iran), Luca Moroni (Italy), Anton Smirnov (Australia, double GM norm) and Helgi Dam Ziska (Faeroe Islands).