Notes from a small island

Notes from a small island
A weblog by Jonathan Ali

Monday, January 06, 2003

Congratulations are in order to four students of my alma mater, Fatima College, for their successes at the T&T Chess Foundation Open Junior Tournament, which ended last Saturday.

Allan Munro, the current Barbados Open Champion, won the under-20 division and led a clean sweep for Fatima as his fellows Imran Hosein and Sean Perryman, the current National Junior Champion, placed second and third respectively. Another Fatima student, Marcus Joseph copped first place in the under-16 division. Players from Barbados and Martinique won the three other divisions.

Sadly I noted only a handful of female names among the placings. Chess is one of the only sports where men and women, theoretically, compete on equal standing. Does the paucity, indeed almost a complete lack of women in chess, as it would seem, point to inherent mental differences between men and women, to complement our physical differences? Bluntly, do women just not have the mind for the game?

Or is Virginia Woolf's Shakespeare's Sister not just a reality of literature, science and other related disciplines, but of chess as well? Do Fischer's Sister and Kasparov's Sister continue to play second fiddle to their siblings simply because they're girls?

Or is chess, basically a scaled-down substitute for war, just a guy thing?

And what does all of this say about the fact that, not counting the king, the queen is the most valuable piece in the game?

Questions, questions...answers, anyone?

posted by Jonathan | 10:58 AM 0 comments

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