?Fide Mas­ter (FM) Ryan Harp­er de­feat­ed his near­est ri­val Mar­cus Joseph on Sun­day in the Na­tion­al Chess Cham­pi­onship Fi­nals to take the lead in­to the home­stretch af­ter nine rounds of the 11-round round-robin tour­na­ment be­ing played at Al­gi­co Plaza, St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain. The clash be­tween Harp­er and Joseph was seen as the de­cid­ing match, as both play­ers kept ahead of the 12 fi­nal­ists on 7.0 points each, go­ing in­to the ninth round. In the Si­cil­ian Schevenin­gen game in­clud­ing the Eng­lish at­tach, Harp­er, with the white pieces, went for G3 on his sixth move fol­lowed by Bg2, which sur­prised Joseph who bat­tled on un­til the 34th move.

With just two rounds re­main­ing, it looks like Harp­er will re­take the ti­tle as na­tion­al chess cham­pi­on for the fifth time, los­ing it last year to Rav­ishen Singh. Joseph, who is ma­jor­ing in math­e­mat­ics at UWI, is the on­ly oth­er play­er with an out­side chance of cap­tur­ing the Prime Min­is­ter's Chal­lenge Tro­phy. The na­tion­al cham­pi­onships is or­gan­ised by T&T Chess As­so­ci­a­tion (TTCA) and is part­ly spon­sored by Na­tion­al Lot­tery Con­trol Board (NL­CB), Al­gi­co, At­lantic LNG Com­pa­ny of T&T and Lu­cozade. The tus­sle for the third place is in­ter­est­ing­ly poised be­tween Keron Cabralis and (FM) Mario Mer­ritt both on 5.5 points.

The pair are close­ly tagged by Kishore Ra­mad­har, (fm) Frank Yee and L Dun­can on 5.0 points. The top three fin­ish­ers will be se­lect­ed to rep­re­sent T&T at the World Chess Olympiad in Rus­sia next year. In the fe­male na­tion­al fi­nals, de­fend­ing cham­pi­on Adi­ti Soon­dars­ingh con­tin­ues to lead on full points af­ter nine rounds. Soon­dars­ingh, on nine points, won her two match­es at the week­end against Jade Nor­eiga and Melis­sa Pereira. She is be­ing fol­lowed by Camille Chung (eight points), who won against Yan­na Lopez and Rhea Ec­cles and Ja­van­na Smith 7.5 points, who won against Lopez.

The top five fin­ish­ers will gain places on the T&T team for the Russ­ian trip next year. An ex­cit­ing fin­ish has de­vel­oped among four play­ers in TTCA 'Open' tour­na­ment, a sev­en-rounds swiss for­mat tour­na­ment, which is al­so tak­ing place along­side the 'na­tion­als'. Kevin Cu­pid, Dev Soon­dars­ingh, An­drew Bowles and Hay­den Lee, are locked on four points each go­ing in­to the last two rounds. The na­tion­al cham­pi­onships, will con­clude this week­end at the same venue. Play­ers are re­mind­ed that the last round on Sun­day will be­gin at 10 am and the na­tion­al Blitz cham­pi­onship will start at 3 pm.