“Pawns are the soul of chess.” — Francois Andre Danican Philidor, French chess player and composer (1726-1795)
Decades ago when I learned chess, a few years after the Guyana Chess Association (GCA) was established in 1972, we were excited at the thought of exploring a new game. Here was a game that never repeated itself so it never got boring.
Chess was played exclusively at Queen’s College, St Stanislaus College and Central High School during the late 1930s prior to the birth of the GCA. As early as 1975, nevertheless, Guyana hosted the first ever Caribbean Chess Championship, which included Cuba, a veritable chess colossus in those days. Emerging from the discussions which followed the championship tournament, it became clear that the quickest way to become champions and to grasp eminence in chess was to have the dedicated involvement of others, rather than to have it contained. Such is the path which Russia, Cuba, India, Bulgaria, China and the United States of America endorsed, and they all produced world chess champions.