THE Bulawayo Chess Association (BCA)has set September 28 as the date for the inaugural Khami Team Chess Tournament.
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Khami Prison will play host to the competition. The tournament was initially set for July 27, but was postponed as the date clashed with the holding of President Robert Mugabe’s star rally.
The spokesman for Bulawayo Chess Club, Moses Mutipforo, said they had moved the tournament to September when schools open. “We moved the dates further to the end of September so that we hold the tournament when the schools are open.
We are interested in having school pupils participating in the competition as we have witnessed in the competition we have held before,” Mutipforo said.
In the team competition, teams have a specified number of players (usually four) and they are paired as teams, with board two playing board one, board two against board two, etc. The team that wins the match gets one match point, the losing team zero. Mutipforo said the staging of the tournament was meant to revive the chess league in the region.
“We want to form an association, but first we need to know the teams, hence we organised this tournament. Each team will have to pay $30 for registration which will close a day before the tournament is held. I encourage all interested players to register early,” Mutipforo said.
So far Bulawayo Polytechnic, Hillside Teachers’ College and Zimbabwe School of Mines, are among 10 teams that have registered to participate in the tournament.
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The tournament will see each team having four players and the teams will play five rounds of games. BCA has been hosting monthly tournaments since the beginning of the year with the recent competition being the Winter Chess tournament which took place in June. These tournaments have seen a significant growth in terms of participants with over 100 chess players taking part in the winter chess games.
The association boasts producing Bulawayo-based chess player Knowledge Ndlovu who won the 2013 South African Open Chess Championship B section which ran concurrently with the Commonwealth Open Chess Championship in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, last month.
Ndlovu is one of Zimbabwe’s top chess players and a regular participant in the BCA’s monthly chess tournaments.
