Guyana names top players for online rapid chess Olympiad
Guyana has submitted the names of the representatives who will participate in the World Chess Federation (FIDE) 2020 Online Rapid Chess Olympiad from July 22 to August 30.
The 12-member team, inclusive of 6 reserve players, is led by team captain Loris Nathoo. In accordance with the FIDE stipulations, Anthony Drayton, Taffin Khan and Wendell Meusa will compete in the Open category. The Women’s category will see Maria-Varona Thomas, Samirah Gobin, Sheriffa Ali, and Yolander Persaud, while the Boys’ Under-20 duo are Rajiv Lee and Joshua Gopaul. Angel Rahim and Sasha Shariff complete the team and are set to do battle in the Girls’ Under-20 category.
Because Guyana has never competed in an online chess tournament, experience is among the positive gains that should be expected. The rapid tournament extravaganza format is also one in which our players can sharpen their skills.
One difficulty lies in the time factor of 15 minutes plus incremental seconds for the duration of a game. The qualifying tournaments originally held for the 2020 Olympiad were conducted with a 90minute time frame. So, players would not be moving the chess pieces and thinking naturally in the current competition, especially since their competitors will likely be the best from their respective nations and will be moving with amazing speed. However, Drayton, Khan, and Meusa should give moderate accounts of themselves as they are accustomed to playing blitz chess online.
Though Covid-19 has inspired this state of affairs, playing chess online is the new order of things, and the Guyana Chess Federation (GCF) intends to use this Olympiad to stimulate its young players to achieve virtual prominence. Each participant, including the team captain, merited his or her place. They were the top finishers of the Grand Prix competition, and the Boys and Girls and Women’s championships.
Varona-Thomas was excused by the GCF for non-participation in the Women’s Championship. However, she merited her place because she is FIDE’s highest ranked local woman player, in addition to being internationally titled.
Black to play and win
White played : Rxf7+ Rxf7 Rg6+ Kf8 Rg8+ Kxg8 Qe8+ Kh7 Qxf7+ Kh8 Qxg8 mate
children aged below five is estimated to have grown 24 per cent since 2000, while nearly half of overweight or obese children of those ages resided in Asia in 2019.
In addition, lower-income countries are increasingly seeing a “double burden” of undernutrition and obesity within the same communities, in the same families and even in some individuals, who may be both stunted and overweight. A recent report in The Lancet estimated that more than one third of low- and middle-income countries experienced these overlapping effects — driven by rising exposure to low-quality, ultra-processed food and drinks.
In relation to diseases, there is another side to the food story too: changes to the environment and societies pose a disease threat to crops as well as people. Ten to 40 per cent of staple crop yields are estimated to be lost to pathogens and pests and climate change may heighten losses in the coming years.
Last year, a strain of Fusarium wilt disease that has plagued banana plantations in parts of Asia for decades spread to Latin America — a region estimated to account for 80 per cent of global banana shipments. Dubbed “banana COVID” by some, the disease has no known cure.
And pressure looks set to grow to contain crop diseases, amid the world’s growing population and a rise in the number of people facing food insecurity from 23 per cent in 2014 to 26 per cent in 2018, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Yet it may not all be doom and gloom if the right steps can be taken. As the world scrambles to find a vaccine for COVID19, there has been some reflection on previous vaccine successes. Smallpox has been eradicated, cholera cases fell 60 per cent in 2018 and wild polio cases have declined more than 99 per cent in the past 30 years — though some polio immunisation programmes face operational challenges and vaccine-derived polio is on the rise.
Progress on universal healthcare has been fastest in lower-income countries, as improvements in quality and access since 2000 have led to reductions in child and maternal deaths. However, the poorest countries still lag far behind and improvements have slowed in these countries since 2010.
Increasingly sophisticated technological tools are also helping battle the variety of diseases the world faces. Artificial intelligence is being used to monitor Fusarium wilt while gridded population maps are helping identify areas at risk of disease outbreak and spread.
There is hope, too, that falling levels of pollution during lockdowns will focus minds on creating healthier, more sustainable environments. But there is a lot to consider if the world is to learn from the lessons of COVID-19 and be better prepared whenever the next pandemic hits.