DaSilva, Puran, Lam enjoy wins over busy chess weekend

Justino DaSilva played an almost perfect six rounds of chess to emerge as the Guyana Chess Federation (GCF) Independence Champion. Owing to the number of participants, the six-round tournament was cut down to two days, commencing on Saturday, May 22.
DaSilva, who won five out of six games (acquiring the same number of points), had his only loss of the tournament to eventual junior champion, 15-year-old Kishan Puran. Gilbert Williams was second place with the same number of wins (five points), having only lost to DaSilva. Joshua Gopaul completed the podium with four wins from six games.
Over in the junior category, Queen’s College’s Puran added another victory to his collection with four points from six games. Jessica Callender finished second among the juniors with 3.5 points, owing to three wins and a draw. The third position in that category saw a three-way tie. Raveon Adonis, Shelby Williams, and Rafael Shaw all garnered three points in the weekend tournament.

Owing to a number of the enlisted players cancelling their participation in the Independence tournament and requesting competitions utilising the shorter format of the game, the GCF is mulling whether the next tournament, most likely in June, will take on the blitz or rapid formats.
In a separate event over the weekend, the GCF Women’s group rolled out its first event.

The event was an online chess competition catering to the Under-16 female players that consisted of five rounds. The eventual champion was 13-year-old Pooja Lam, a student of the Saraswati Vidya Niketan School, who is up and coming on the chess scene.
Lam’s overall win was decided in the fourth round of the competition, when she came up against Queen’s College’s Mahila Rajkumar, the tournament favourite. In that encounter, Rajkumar blundered the Queen on move 22 and eventually went on to lose the encounter, deciding Lam’s competition victory. Lam’s only blemish was a draw, resulting in her gaining 4.5 points.
Rajkumar had to settle for second place, garnering four points from her five games. Anya Lall of the Deaf Academy clinched third place after a pretty slow start. Her first two encounters resulted in a loss and a draw, before she pulled her game together to register a winning streak over the remaining rounds. Lall finished with 3.5 points to bag her spot in the top three.