Kriskal Persaud first came to attention on the local chess scene as a diminutive 12-year-old junior player from Berbice.
On Sunday, at the Ocean Spray Hotel, Persaud showed that he had grown in more ways than one.
That little boy from Berbice had grown to not only become a 33-year-old man, but had also outgrown his competitors in knowledge of the sport.
The result was that Persaud on Sunday night, wrote his name in the annals of chess in Guyana when he won the coveted national chess championship.
He won his two remaining matches against Ronuel Greenidge and Learie Webster to finish on 15 points, half-a-point ahead of runner up and Stabroek News’s chess columnist Errol Tiwari in the gruelling 18-round tournament where the nine competitors played each other twice.
Persaud’s triumph was all the more remarkable as he told Stabroek Sport last night that he had stopped playing in 1992 after the Guyana Chess Federation’s Main Street venue became uninhabitable.
He re-emerged for the qualifying tournament which guaranteed one participation in the championship tournament, winning that too.
Persaud told Stabroek Sport that the tournament was relatively easy and that his main difficulty was travelling to Georgetown on week-ends when the tournament was played.
Persaud said he travelled to Georegetown and back home every Saturday and Sunday.
He pinpointed Tiwari as his toughest competitor but said the rest of the gameswere very easy – a damning indictment against the standard of the sport here.
Persaud told Stabroek Sport that he was crowned national junior chess champion in 1988 after participating in the national chess championships.
He said that tournament was won by a Cuban Grandmaster with Gordon Broomes in second position.
Persaud said he and three other players (all seniors) were tied for third position and he, being a junior player was declared junior champion.
Errol Tiwari, one of two players to defeat Persaud ( the other was Andre Griffith) finished half-a-point behind Persaud after earlier getting past Loris Nathoo and Irshad Mohamed easily.
Greenidge, who was in third position throughout the tournament lost to Persaud and Shiv Nandalall in his final round games allowing Nathoo, who defeated Griffith to sneak into the third spot.
The final standings are:Persaud 15 points, Tiwari 14