The Guyana Chess Federation is looking to stage its Annual General Meeting sometime in June says President Frankie Farley.
According to Farley, elections are constitutionally due in November but they have decided to bring it forward as they want to get the structure in place so as to roll out the new initiatives.
Farley says there might be some technological challenges since the meeting will be held virtually.
At the upcoming AGM, plans are to elect a new executive management committee and new directors since the federation is now incorporated.
“Basically we were incorporated November 2019. The GCF is no longer governed by the Friendly Society and its regulations. We’re now governed by the Company Act and based on that, the board has approved a new constitution.”
Farley says that the new constitution sees the GCF doing away with the previous governance structure.
They now have a president, a vice president, four directors, a company secretary, a chief finance officer, (replacing the treasurer) and five committee members.
The new constitution is quite comprehensive dealing with the purpose of the federation and some of its objectives to playing tournaments locally and internationally.
There is also an appeals committee which looks into appeals by members and the formation of regional associations which seek to spread the game among the administrative regions of Guyana.
“With respect to the regional architecture, in essence what we are doing is encouraging the formation of clubs in all the regions,” said Farley.
The GCF plans to hold biennial congresses.
“Every two years there will be a congress where a new board will be elected which will in turn approve the various committees such as the tournament committee, the anti-cheating committee, the women and girls committee and the differently-able committee,” said Farley.
Since the onset of the pandemic which has affected over the board competitions, the GCF has opted to stage more online tournaments, but the online games have had its own issues.
“One of the challenges of playing online chess is to monitor the players online to ensure there is no cheating,” said Farley.
He said that the various platforms use security systems which analyze the games to see the percentage of accuracy and from that one could deduce whether a player based on his/her ranking is cheating or not and investigate further.
Guyana is scheduled to compete at the Chess Olympiad which was postponed from last year to this year but Farley said the tournament has not been deferred as yet.
The 44th Chess Olympiad was initially scheduled to be held in Khanty, Mansiysk last year but has been postponed to this year in Moscow, Russia.
“They’re still looking at the data, there are some healthy discussions going on about not only the Olympiad but all the major global tournaments,” said Farley.
Locally Farley says that he is pleased with the active chess in schools programme where over 200 children are participating.
