Junior chess champion Keron Sandiford, Queen’s College student Kyle Couchman and Shazeeda Rahim reigned supreme at the recent Century 21 Grand Prix chess tournament, which was held at the Racquet Centre and the School of the Nations.
After seven of the tournament’s eight rounds, when this column was written, Sandiford and Couchman had demonstrated their supremacy by playing unbeaten and conceding lone draws. Rahim had won seven of seven rounds.
The Grands Prix operate on a points system. The players 
with the highest number of Grand Prix points travel to the elitist Olympiad. This year the biennial Olympiad, the 45th, takes place from the 10 to 23 September in Budapest, Hungary. It will be the first Olympiad to take place in Hungary after Budapest hosted the second unofficial Olympiad in 1926.
In international news, Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu defeated world champion Ding Liren with the black pieces in the annual 2024 Tata Steel Chess Tournament in the Netherlands. Last year, also with the black pieces, in the identical tournament, Pragg also outplayed Ding who was not world champion as yet. Anish Giri leads the Tata tournament which ends next Sunday.
