FM Joshua John­son, rep­re­sent­ing T&T, ex­celled at the Con­ti­nen­tal Chess Cham­pi­onships held in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic from May 14-23.

John­son, who had an ini­tial rank­ing of 52 out of 158 play­ers, com­ing in­to the tour­na­ment which boast­ed 23 Grand Mas­ters and 29 In­ter­na­tion­al Mas­ters (IM) with par­tic­i­pa­tion from 24 coun­tries, end­ed the tour­na­ment ranked at 31, up 21 places.

John­son earned 6.5 points out of 11 and had the best per­for­mance ever by a T&T play­er at these Con­ti­nen­tal Cham­pi­onships. In the process, John­son earned an­oth­er In­ter­na­tion­al Mas­ter Norm and an in­crease of rat­ing by 59 rat­ing points, which will take his rat­ing to 2304 and to the po­si­tion of the sec­ond high­est FIDE rat­ed play­er in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean be­hind IM Alan-Sa­far Ra­moutar, who is al­so from T&T. At­tain­ing a rat­ing of 2400 will make John­son el­i­gi­ble for the In­ter­na­tion­al Mas­ter ti­tle as he has the req­ui­site 3 norms to meet the ti­tle re­quire­ments.

John­son’s rat­ing at the be­gin­ning of the tour­na­ment was 2249 while his op­po­nents had an av­er­age rat­ing of 2452 (more than 200 points high­er). John­son’s jour­ney to his out­stand­ing per­for­mance com­prised 2 wins and 5 draws against Grand­mas­ters which was un­prece­dent­ed at this cham­pi­onship.

John­son, though ex­haust­ed, was very hap­py at the end of his event as he re­marked, “I was very hap­py with my over­all stan­dard of play. Af­ter my 2nd round win against GM from Cu­ba I felt en­er­gised and up to the task to give it my all. I al­so felt very mo­ti­vat­ed see­ing that I on­ly had 2 loss­es for the en­tire tour­na­ment, one in the fi­nal round against a GM and an­oth­er in round sev­en against an IM.

"Al­so, the sup­port that I re­ceived from play­ers across the re­gion re­al­ly heart­ened me while al­so en­cour­ag­ing me to con­tin­ue push­ing. This is al­so the first time I have par­tic­i­pat­ed in back-to-back high lev­el events, as I played in the his­toric Ca­pa­blan­ca Open in Cu­ba a few days be­fore. I be­lieve this ex­po­sure, to­geth­er with my train­ing over the past few months, played a ma­jor role in my per­for­mance.”

T&T Chess As­so­ci­a­tion (TTCA) pres­i­dent, Son­ja John­son, was al­so thrilled, say­ing: “Joshua’s per­for­mance re­al­ly was out­stand­ing. Up to the 6th round, Joshua had no loss­es af­ter al­ready play­ing 5 Grand Mas­ters. He has re­al­ly flown the flag high for Trinidad and To­ba­go and we look for­ward to more in­spired per­for­mances from him.”