The International Chess Federation (FIDE) announced on June 30th that an ONLINE CHESS OLYMPIAD would be held from July 22nd to August 30th 2020. National Federations desirous of participating have been advised that the names of team members had to be submitted by July 13th.
The tournament will have two stages:
i) A Division stage
ii) A Play-off stage
The Division stage
FIDE has indicated that participating teams would be ranked based on their performance ranking achieved at the last Olympiad held in Batumi, Georgia. Based on this ranking, teams will be placed in five divisions. Lower ranked teams will be placed in the Base Division while the higher ranked teams would be placed in Division 1.
Yolander Persaud
Category tournaments would be held progressively, starting with the Base Division. The best performing teams will progress to Division 4, where a similar category tournament will be held. Again, the best performing teams will advance to the next Division (3).
Guyana placed 128th at the last Olympiad, and would most likely be placed in Category 4, as opposed to the lower Base category group. Category 4 games are scheduled for play from July 29th to August 2nd. On completion of the Division 1 tournament, the top twelve teams will advance to the second stage of the tournament.
The Play-off stage
This stage will comprise of a series of knockout duels. There will be four rounds: Preliminary round, Quarter finals, Semi-Finals and a Final Duel between the top two (2) teams.
Anthony Drayton
Selection criteria used by the GCF
Given the extremely short notice (2 weeks) received for the submission of the names of the team, the GCF decided to utilise the results of i) the prior tournaments that were held to select the teams to represent Guyana at the Olympiad that was planned to be held in Russia in August of this year, and ii) the results of the last qualifying tournaments for the 2020 Junior Championships.
The Olympiad was postponed to next year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Maria-Varona Thomas
The GCF had explored the possibility of organizing a series of RAPID tournaments to select the team, but decided that it would be impractical to do so due to a number of factors, including i) the COVID-19 social distancing constraints that eliminated the possibility of hosting over- the-board tournaments, and ii) the limited time available to implement measures that would be necessary to reduce the possibility of online cheating.
Wendell Meusa
Team Selected
Open Section
– Anthony Drayton (FM) – Reigning Open National Champion
– Taffin Khan (CM) – 1st Place ranking – 2020 Olympiad Grand Prix standings
– Wendell Meusa (CM) – 2nd Place ranking – 2020 Olympiad Gran Prix standings
– Loris Nathoo – 3rd Place ranking – 2020 Olympiad Grand Prix standings
Women
– Maria-Varona Thomas (WFM) – 2019 Women’s National Champion
– Samirah Gobin – 2nd Place 2020 Women’s National Championship
– Sheriffa Ali (WCM) – 3rd Place 2020 Women’s National Championship
– Yolander Persaud – 4th Place 2020 Women’s National Championship
Joshua Gopaul
Under-20 (Open)
Rajiv Lee
– Rajiv Lee – 1ST Place Qualifiers, 2020 National Junior Championship
– Joshua Gopaul – 2nd Place Qualifiers, 2020 National Junior Championship
Under 20 (Women)
– Sasha Shariff – 2020 Women’s National Champion
– Angel Rahim – 5th Place 2020 Women’s National Championship
