Coordinators of the Marian Academy Chess Club are confident that the sport goes a long way towards improving academic performances. As such, the Club seeks to push the Chess in Schools mandate by hosting club meetings every week.
A section of the competition on Saturday
Instructor John Lee, who took charge of the club some six years ago, gave a little insight as to how the thriving club is conducted.
“Well, we have two departments: the primary and the secondary. The primary we focus on basics, how the pieces move, strategies, checkmates, that kind of thing. Secondary is more strategy, basically a more advanced level of play,” he shared.
“And what I do is I bring the secondaries [students] to national tournaments, when the Chess Federation has tournaments I try to take a team to compete.” This, he explained, gives the students exposure to other players, styles and strategies that they may not encounter within the school club.
When questioned about the academic performances of the club members, Lee posited that chess contributed positively to their overall well-being and their exam results were proof of that.
“Let me put it this way: a lot of my students here were in top of the school for the [National Grade Six Assessment] NGSA and they usually are. Chess teaches them to think and to concentrate and they benefit from that,” Lee stated.
The Club completed yet another competition this past weekend, which saw participation from 57 of their members, across the primary and secondary departments.
Ethan Lee played impressively to cop the secondary top spot, while William Escarraga beat out all his opponents to win the primary category.
After the competition, National Chess Champion CM Wendell Meusa played a simultaneous exhibition against the young participants. A simultaneous exhibition or simultaneous display is a board game exhibition in which one player plays multiple games at a time with a number of other players. Meusa took on 50 children from the Marian Chess Club simultaneously walking from one board to another, immediately after making one or two moves per board and young players were amazed by this as Meusa checkmated the players one by one.
The Marian Academy Chess Club has produced a number of spectacular young players inclusive of Champion Ethan Lee and Sasha Shariff, who is slated to represent Guyana at the World Chess Olympiad later this year in Batumi, Georgia.
