Tutorial high school student Sham Khan leads the juniors in the DDL Topco Juices qualifying tournament for the national chess championships. So far, Sham has been having a successful tournament as he remains unbeaten on four points from four games. Queen’s College student Cecil Cox, who is the current national junior champion, is automatically seeded to the nationals.
In the senior category of the tournament, which is not being used as a qualifier for the nationals, Omar Shariff leads with the maximum four points. Omar outplayed Taffin Khan to score a full point and lead the tournament with the maximum four points. Shiv Nandalall is also playing well, but he lost a crucial game to Learie Webster. Webster became disillusioned following his two successive losses, and actually failed to turn up for his next game.
Tournament Director Irshad Mohamed encouraged him to return to the tournament and he gave Nandalall his first loss.
Two big tournaments are yet to be played before the end of the year – the national championships and the annual national schools tournament. The Ministry of Sports is the exclusive and official sponsor of the schools tournament. Dr Anthony has placed great importance on this tournament because we have schools from all around the country meeting in Georgetown to compete in a chess competition. Some time in the future we are hoping to have a regional schools chess championship where the idea would be to send a regional chess team to the World Schools Chess Championships.
Twenty-six players from ten countries were invited to play in the Masters Tournament of the Abu Dhabi Chess Festival. Ukranian grandmaster Anton Korobov (2657) won the tournament with 6.5 points from nine games. Second seed, Grandmaster Gadir Guseinov (2611) of Azerbaijan won the blitz tournament. He started one round late in the Masters tournament. In the fourth round Gasimov lost a winning position against Antonio from India, who made an International Master norm.
