By Tamica Garnett
The Guyana Chess Federation’s (GCF) rapid chess tournament is expected to start off today at the Keishar’s Sports Club, Camp and Hadfield Street, Georgetown.
Sponsored by Apex Insurance Brokers Incorporated, the one-day tournament will be a seven-round, Swiss system affair with a time limit of 40 minutes per game. Registration will begin at 9am and the games are scheduled to begin one hour later. The tournament will be held in two categories seniors and juniors.
Trophies and cash prizes will be up for grabs for those who prove to be the best of the lot.
This will be the second rapid chess tournament for the year held by the GCF, with the first one being held in March.
Rapid chess is a game in which each side is given less time to make their moves than the normal tournament time control.
Players are allotted small increments of time per move.
Tournament Director, Irshad Mohammed, said that the federation has hopes of increasing the prevalence of tournaments of such nature. Mohammed explained that because of the short nature of the tournament, it is normally likely to attract more participants than would the regular tournament that would usually span across several days.
“We want to make them a regular thing for the fact that people can come out for the one day. Because you can get it over with in one day, we’ve been considering holding one every month. It’s not like the regular tournaments that might stretch for two weekends and some people can’t always make it for the two weekends, so this is something that the federation has been looking into,” Mohammed said.
He noted that it is also beneficial for the players, in that the rapid nature of the game demands that the players develop quick thinking capabilities as they are given a very short time in which to compact their usually intense deliberations.
The tournament fee for non-member seniors will be $800.00 and juniors $600.00 while senior members will pay $300.00 and junior members $200.00, and all interested players are asked to bring along their chess set and clocks.
