Chess with Errol

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.

Twelve players are representing Guyana at the 2021 Online Chess Olympiad (Rapid), which began on Friday and ends on September 15.

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.

Chess game White: Mark Taimanov Black: Bobby Fischer  Tournament: Candidates Quarterfinal.

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.

The question of who is the greatest chess player of all time is constantly being asked and debated.

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.

The Guyana Chess Federation’s (GCF) annual independence six-round classical tournament continues today from 10 am at the National Stadium, Providence.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, “a prodigy is a child who, by about age 10, performs at the level of a highly trained adult in a particular sphere of activity or knowledge.

Now that the irregular 2020-21 Candidates Tournament has ended, all focus is on the World Championship Match which is more than six months away and is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, November 24.

Russian Grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi won the acclaimed World Champion-ship Candidates Chess Tournament in Yekaterinburg, Russia, last week with a round to spare and claimed the right to challenge world champion Magnus Carlsen for his title.

As the World Champion-ship Candidates Tourna-ment continued, Russia’s number one chess player Ian Nepomniachtchi defeated his countryman Kirill Alekseenko in 31 moves in a Catalan setup with a fianchettoed king’s bishop in Round 10, which was played on Wednesday last.

The Candidates Tournament to select the most suitable chess player to oppose world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway resumes tomorrow.