The failure of the Guyana Chess Federation (GCF) to engineer a national chess championship during 2016 was excruciating to those persons who qualified for the tournament, and markedly embarrassing for those who are in tune with the game.
The qualifiers were held during the final quarter of the year, but the actual championship did not take place. Was it a denial of sponsorship for the illustrious competition? In life, as in chess, there is the principle of contingency: everything depends on everything else. The major aspect of this equation, in this case sponsorship, is dependent or contingent on whatever is happening around those dedicated benefactors, taking into consideration also, that which occurred beforehand.
Numbers are essential to sponsors. They view them as the very manifestation of their existence. As numbers dwindle, sponsorship lessens. This is the unadulterated truth. But, perhaps it was not be a case of trivial sponsorship, or no sponsorship at all, which caused the championship to be forsaken. There may well be another reason. In time we will become aware of the facts.
There is the possibility that sponsors are feeling within their minds, they have given the grain of seed time to germinate and bear fruit, and this is not happening. For how long can we endure one dozen to 20 of the identical persons playing competitive chess continuously? The faces are the same, including mine.
We need fresh faces. We need youthful faces. We need to expand the game. When chess restarted its engines in 2006 – 2007, the goodwill for the game was exemplary. Demerara Distillers Limited, Kei-Shar’s, Banks DIH Limited, Red Cherry, GTT, Digicel and Ocean Spray Hotel etc were some of the favourite sponsors of the exhilarating pastime. In 2007, the Oasis Café presented a first prize of $40,000 among other prizes for a competition that was held in the restaurant. King’s Plaza Hotel attached no cost for the use of its facilities for the national chess championships. In the beginning, at the restart of chess, Gafoor’s sponsored a complete cocktail reception, as did GTT. The fondness for chess was heartwarming.
From the time of the Guyana Chess Association in the early 1970s, chess operated from a height of social influence. This social position has been attached to the game for centuries, filling every quarter in which it is played, with its hope and promise.
Parents should allow their children to play competitively. Once the playing times are regulated, neither the children nor the parents, have anything to lose. Children become smarter; they perform better at Math and English. As legendary world chess champion Garry Kasparov has noted, chess is spreading rapidly across the younger generation with an upward trend being observed in scholastic chess. Guyana should not be left behind.
There is a modest and intelligent way to tackle the expansion of chess for regional schoolchildren. We can aspire to reach out to schoolteachers from far-away regions who are attending the Teachers Training College. Once they learn the game, they can teach it to their students. I would leave the arithmetic of how many chess sets each teacher would receive up to the GCF, and the relevant authorities. But that is an unassuming outline of a basic concept for the expansion of the logical mind game into the regions. A former lecturer at the Teacher’s Training College Kenrick Braithwaite and I exchanged some thoughts about such a venture and we concluded the GCF should formalize the idea, and, perhaps, with every other aspect of an arrangement being conducive, concretize the idea. At least it would represent a basic beginning for the expansion of chess in Guyana.
Internationally, world champion Magnus Carlsen is still the highest-ranked chess player in the world at 2840 rating points. US grandmaster Fabiano Caruana has moved up to 2827 and is only 13 points away from Carlsen. Russia’s Vladimir Kramnik is posted at 2811 in the third spot.
