Chess got off to a roaring beginning this year as two successive tournaments were held in late January and early February.
Added to this development, the news fairy has announced that the qualification process for the 2019 Junior National Championship will begin shortly, followed by the qualifications for the Seniors. In relation to the Women/Girls categories, it is not clear how this aspect will happen; there are not many women who play competitive chess. Though it is on the rise among the youth.
This is evident in the seasoned top schools.
The founder of the Guyana Chess Association, which later became the Guyana Chess Federation (GCF), the late Linden Forbes Burnham, used to maintain that playing chess was an exemplary pastime. You learn from it, he used to say. I remember Cyrillene Massiah from those years. She was the best in her category. Later, when he was elected President of the GCF, David A Granger, encouraged getting women and girls involved in chess.
It took some time for the GCF to muster a women’s Olympiad chess team, but eventually we did. Last October, Guyana fielded a women’s chess team for the 2018 Chess Olympiad; the women performed well.
In international news, FIDE has published its February 2019 chess rating list. The top ten chess players worldwide are as follows:
1. Magnus Carlsen, 2845, Norway
2. Fabiano Caruana, 2828, USA
3. Ding Liren, 2812, China
4. Anish Giri, 2797, Netherlands
5. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, 2790, Azerbaijan
6. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, 2780, France
7. Viswanathan Anand, 2779, India
8. Ian Nepomniachtchi, 2771, Russia
9. Alexander Grischuk, 2771, Russia
10. Levon Aronian, 2767, Armenia
