Trinidad and Tobago chess team wins gold at Caricom Classic

The Trinidad and Tobago chess team of Fide Master (FM) Quinn Cabralis, FM Joshua Johnson, Woman Candidate Master (WCM) Zara La Fleur and WCM Ysvett Hermoso Rodriguez put in a gold-medal winning performance when the inaugural Caricom Classic concluded at the Ramada Georgetown Princess Hotel in Guyana over the weekend.

Heading into the final day of competition on Saturday, TT held a lead over the hosts Guyana, who fielded two teams in the competition. The TT quartet showed their collective pedigree to come out with the victory and take the tournament's top spot as well.

In Saturday's final round, Cabralis secured a victory over Anthony Drayton, while La Fleur, TT's national junior champion, also won her matchup to finish the competition with a perfect score of nine points – the highest score recorded by any player throughout the week-long competition.

Johnson, a 2023 CAC Games silver medallist, was held to a draw in his final round match with Taffin Khan, but TT did enough to beat Guyana in the head-to-head matchup as they racked up 3.5 points to Guyana's 0.5 points.

TT finished with 31 out of a possible 36 points throughout the nine rounds of action which was played in a round-robin format and saw each team fielding two male and two female players. In their individual matchups, the TT players recorded 27 wins, to go along with eight draws and the solitary loss. The TT team also received 18 match points for winning all their matches in the round-robin competition.

Hosts Guyana aside, TT showed their dominance and prowess against the Bahamas, Barbados, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Jamaica, Saint Lucia and Suriname to come away with the championship trophy.

TT Chess Association (TTCA) president Sonja Johnson thanked the Guyanese Chess Federation for hosting the classic, and she heaped praises on TT's chess squad for their stellar efforts as well.

"The pride I feel for this team right now is unparalleled. Apart from the discipline and tremendous efforts over the board, I am also so warmed by the camaraderie off the board," Johnson said, via a TTCA press release.

"The interactions we had before each round, offering words of encouragement, discussions of team strategy, sharing of expertise in various openings and positions among team members which in the end resulted in almost perfect execution, augurs well for us at the Chess Olympiad to be held in Budapest, Hungary later in September."