Carl Ja­cobs

Na­tion­al chess cham­pi­on FM Ryan Harp­er, as­sist­ed by ex-cham­pi­on Mar­cus Joseph, has again made chess his­to­ry, but this time not over the chess­board. In­stead, the two stal­warts have joint­ly launched the coun­try's first chess mag­a­zine, Ace Chess, in­tend­ed pri­mar­i­ly to serve the Caribbean chess com­mu­ni­ty. In his fore­word, pub­lish­er Harp­er gives the rai­son d'etre for this pi­o­neer­ing ef­fort. He notes the sig­nif­i­cant evo­lu­tion of chess in the re­gion over re­cent years. The ÇÇ&Ar­ing; and Ç&Ar­ing;ÇDEÇ, for ex­am­ple, have "changed the land­scape." There are now more ju­nior tour­na­ments; the Sagi­cor Open in Bar­ba­dos and now the Carif­ta Chess Games re­cent­ly held in Port-of-Spain. On the open side of things, he notes, Caribbean play­ers have op­por­tu­ni­ties at the Sub Zon­als to fight for IM and FIDE Mas­ter ti­tles.

There are al­so op­por­tu­ni­ties at the Con­ti­nen­tal Open to gain IM norms. Bar­ba­dos has its an­nu­al He­roes Day Mas­ters and Çup, Suri­name its Ro­tary Open, Ja­maica its Ja­maica Open and now T&T its Open In­ter­na­tion­al. Al­so there is the Uma­da Cup which is ex­pect­ed to be held in Suri­name this year. "This mag­a­zine," says Harp­er, "will try its best to cov­er many of these Caribbean and wider re­gion­al tour­na­ments with the hope that it strength­ens chess with­in the Caribbean." Dou­ble Rooks sin­cere­ly wel­comes the in­tent and ef­fort be­hind this pi­o­neer­ing ef­fort. While sources of in­for­ma­tion on this glob­al­ly ex­pand­ing sport have mul­ti­plied with the ad­vance of tech­nol­o­gy, the game in the Caribbean has been de­vel­op­ing to the point where it may re­quire its own fo­cus of at­ten­tion and con­cen­tra­tion, a con­tin­u­ing rel­e­vant sur­vey of re­gion­al chess ac­tion as an aid to the process of ap­pre­ci­a­tion and growth.

In the past, one or two am­a­teur­ish at­tempts have been made to pro­duce a pe­ri­od­i­cal on lo­cal chess, but these ef­forts hasti­ly died a nat­ur­al death as the man­pow­er and ex­per­tise need­ed to sus­tain them were sad­ly lack­ing.

How­ev­er, the ini­tial ap­pear­ance of Ace Chess, backed by the vi­sion, ex­pe­ri­ence and en­thu­si­asm of pub­lish­er FM Harp­er and his pro­duc­tion as­sis­tant Mar­cus Joseph, in­spires us the hope that this mag­a­zine will even­tu­al­ly de­vel­op in­to a valu­able and in­for­ma­tive fea­ture of chess life in the Caribbean, play­ing its part in lift­ing stan­dards of the sport. Gen­er­al­ly, Ace Chess of­fers a var­ied quan­ti­ty of chess wis­dom in its ex­pert an­no­ta­tion of games played in re­gion­al events such as the T&T Na­tion­al Swiss 2011 and the Uma­da Cup 2011 and in­ter­na­tion­al con­tests such as the su­per GM tour­na­ments of Tata Steel 2012 and Reg­gio Emilio 2012. But, as far as de­vel­op­ment of chess is con­cerned, the most valu­able fea­ture of the mag­a­zine may be found in its Youth sec­tion where games played in the var­i­ous sec­tions of the na­tion­al age group cham­pi­onships are care­ful­ly and sen­si­bly an­no­tat­ed, of­fer­ing a teach­ing fa­cil­i­ty that as­pir­ing young­sters should find quite use­ful.

DR be­lieves that this as­pect of Ace Chess should be com­pre­hen­sive­ly ex­pand­ed. Look­ing to the fu­ture of the sport, the mag­a­zine could hard­ly un­der­take a more im­por­tant mis­sion than the en­cour­age­ment and strength­en­ing of the re­gions young play­ers. In this con­text, Mar­cus Joseph's Tips adds pos­i­tive­ly to the val­ue of the ef­fort, point­ing out some fac­tors which sep­a­rate the av­er­age club play­er from the mas­ter. Two of them: the in­abil­i­ty to cal­cu­late well and a poor un­der­stand­ing of the end game. Read­ers should al­so find IM van Delft's "Guess the Move" sec­tion both en­ter­tain­ing and in­struc­tion­al. Apart from their own ex­pe­ri­ence and ex­per­tise, it is good that Harp­er and Joseph have been able to ob­tain the con­tribut­ing sup­port of no­ta­bles such as GM Alon­so Za­p­a­ta and IM Mer­i­jn van Delft. Dou­ble Rooks him­self is al­so pleased to con­tribute to this brave pi­o­neer­ing ef­fort, no mat­ter how mod­est his in­put may be.

How­ev­er, as the au­thor of a week­ly chess col­umn for some sev­en years, he would like to of­fer a piece of gen­uine ad­vice to the pro­duc­ers of Ace Chess. Over this time, DR has had to deal with the at­tacks of a few par­ti­san in­di­vid­u­als who ap­par­ent­ly fail to re­alise that the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic poli­cies of our coun­try should al­so ap­ply to every area of sport, in­clud­ing chess. From that per­spec­tive, DR hopes that the op­er­at­ing pol­i­cy of Ace Chess would be en­light­ened enough to recog­nise the ef­forts of all per­sons, groups and or­gan­i­sa­tions in­volved in the pro­mo­tion of the sport, par­tic­u­lar­ly those whose track record and suc­cess­es are long stand­ing, wide­ly ac­cept­ed and, in­deed, un­prece­dent­ed.