“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.
With the elections less than a month away, here is some background information pertaining to the incorporation of the Guyana Chess Federation (GCF) as a private company.
The 2021 FIDE Online Olympiad has reached the playoff division stage with the top chess teams of the world qualifying for the quarter final stage of the tournament, which concludes September 15.
The statistics from the 2020 and 2021 online Chess Olympiads are taken from two reports prepared by Guyanese Loris Nathoo, who was player/ captain of the 2020 team, and player of the 2021 team.
Ten of the world’s top chess players are currently competing in the St Louis Rapid and Blitz tournament, the fourth and final of the 2021 Grand Chess Tour (GCT), which ends tomorrow.
Guyana’s Under-10 chess players who participated in the FIDE Online Rapid World Cup Cadets & Youth Champ-ionship 2021 expressed themselves handsomely against the creme de la creme of the U-10 community of chess players worldwide.
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) has announced an online 2021 Chess Olympiad from August 13 to September 15 at which Guyana would be represented.
The fourteenth and fifteenth world chess champions Vladimir Kramnik (Russia) and Viswanathan Anand (India) engaged in a duel of wits in a four-game “no-castling match” at the historic Dortmund Sparkassen Trophy, Germany.
On Wednesday June 30, 2021, Abhimanyu Mishra, a 12-year-old from Englishtown, New Jersey, USA, became the youngest grandmaster in the history of chess, breaking the 19-year record of Russian grandmaster Sergey Karjakin, who had achieved the feat in 2002 at the age of 12 years and 7 months.
Forty students participated in the Guyana Chess Federation (GCF) qualifying championship tournament a week ago despite preparations for the National Grade Six Assessment, Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examinations and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination.
Andrew Walker, a former Queen’s College student and a veteran chess player now residing in the New York tri-state area, visited Guyana last week after 30 years.
Last month, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) published the qualification criteria that will be used for entry into the 2022 Candidates Tournament.
World Champion Magnus Carlsen defeated American grandmaster Wesley So in an Arma-geddon match to win the FTX Crypto Cup, the sixth tournament of the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour recently.
Over the last weekend, the Guyana Chess Federation engineered a combined junior and senior Independence over-the-board tournament and a virtual girls’ competition.