COJA 2007: CHESS AFTERMATH. Not yet Uhuru for Nigerian Chess by Kolawole Ladokun

The 9th All-Africa games, Algiers 2007 came to an end earlier this week with the chess event being dominated by Egypt. Nigeria did well at the competition considering the number of tournaments played in the country, the rating of our players, and the fact that we finished above the host country, Algeria, in both the male and female events.

Our ladies did us very proud, winning 3 individual gold medals, and the team silver behind Egypt. The male team could not match its feat in Abuja 2003 as it came up 4th behind Egypt (once again?), South Africa and Zambia who finished in 1st, 2nd and 3rd places respectively.

Here, I would like to look at the factors affecting the overall team performance, and how they could be alleviated or eradicated (using the common parlance on the Nigerian political scene).

Factors which affected the teams’ performance include those caused by the quality of chess organization in the country, how the individuals treat chess and the Nigerian perception about chess in general.

Organizational Factors

No Chess Calendar.
One thing that is evidently lacking in the Nigerian chess scene at the moment is that basic tool; A calendar. Without it, we do not have a real plan for events, and as such, tournaments just stumble on us and we take a Fire Brigade approach (which is not peculiar to chess anyway). If we do have a chess calendar, we’d be able to prepare adequately for tournaments. It’s not going to be an easy task to build a calendar, of course, but, with determination, we can get 4 high-level national tournaments and get up to 20 players to go abroad for competitions twice a year.

Inadequate Sourcing For Capital
For a calendar to be effective, we need capital. The best sources of capital are corporate sponsors but chess sponsors seem to have been reducing in number over the years. We need to reverse this trend, make our past sponsors come back to us and attract more sponsors to our dear sport.

Poor Quality of Venues
The pre-qualifiers for Algiers 2007 (see the article by Demola Sorungbe, our roving correspondent); chess was played in the open. I’ve also played chess before in a badly-lit room. These are obviously not acceptable anywhere else in the world.Good venues aren’t only essential for deep thought and calculation, which are both vital to chess, they also improve the prestige of the game. If we make more frequent use of good venues, like the Union Bank Sports Club, Bode Thomas Street, Surulere, the venue of the 1st V-mobile Ultimate Chess Challenge, or even well-lit gymnasiums in the various stadia across the country, the level of concentration of players in games would improve and more people (potential sponsors) would be drawn to the game.

Lack of Refresher Courses
Also, chess players, coaches, arbiters, managers and aficionados alike should go for refresher courses abroad to improve on their different roles in the sport. This is actually a medium-term possibility, which would happen only when we’ve gotten multi-national corporations as our sponsors or the Federal and State Governments have seen the importance of chess, just like science, as a key tool in the development of human intellect. Right now, we can seek FIDE’s assistance (or the African chess organization’s) to help us get in touch with the latest advancement in each of these areas, via electronic means or otherwise.

Time-control
A recurring problem with every chess tournament I’ve been in is that of time-control. During the World University Chess Championships- WUCC 2006 pre-qualifiers, Ibadan when it was even reduced by 30 minutes for each player. We should have more tournaments with at least a 2-hour control for each player. The value of time-control is seen when Dennis Monokroussos, the Playchess trainer on chessbase.com was asked why his USCF rating dropped from 2434 to low-mid 2300s-“too much blitz, too little tournament chess”, he said.

Individual Factors

Inadequate Preparation
As the saying goes in real life, “the first impression is always a lasting one”. Imagine meeting someone for the first time and the person neglects you, saying neither hello nor hi, nor even showing any sign of your existence, the likelihood of your friendship or any kind of good relationship existing between you both is almost zilch.As it is in life, so it is in chess. If you give the impression that you don’t have the proper chess manners of centre-control, development, sound knowledge of opening theory, you would most likely struggle in the middle-game and, more often than not, you would lose!

Good practice is to have at most five openings that you prepare for a tournament and continue to study them and use them in praxis until you understand the aims and hidden tricks of these openings. After this, you can begin to adopt openings that fit your style of play and subsequently improve your style of play. It’s as simple as this: “Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance”.

Chess Psychology
Former World Champion, Bobby Fischer once said he won a lot of games before they even began because his opponents feared him due to his overwhelming reputation. Psychology is not a new thing to Nigerians as we use it and experience it in our everyday lives. We should make moves, not because we are playing grandmasters or fishes, but because they are good moves. We chess players should be immune to such things as outside distractions, smiley faces, poker faces, delay tactics (spending 30 minutes on an obvious move), regular movement to and from the toilet, just to mention a few.

Team Communication
Unified World Champion, GM Vladimir Kramnik won each and every one of his World Championships with one thing- his team. We are privileged to have as our coaches highly experienced and very active players who know the strengths and weaknesses of a lot of players (including those of some foreign professionals). Because of this, our coaches can advise players on choice of openings, approach to middle-game and endgames they are comfortable with (and those opponents are uncomfortable with).

For example, arguably the best chess player ever, who now disturbs President Putin in Russian politics, Garry Kasparov, said he chose closed formations in his games against Deep Fritz, as computers can best exercise their calculating prowess in open positions. Working with his team must have shown him this. Team play has also been the secret of the Russian team at various Olympiads, and also, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and Yabatech (now City University, Yaba) teams at various competitions.

The Environmental Factors

Poor Media Coverage
One of the best things that could happen to Nigerian chess now is to have a weekly 1-hour show on radio or TV like “Bayo Teaches Chess”, anchored by Adebayo “Littlebee” Adegboyega on Lagos Television (LTV) in the 1990s. We could also have a chess column like Raymond Keene’s “Keene Chess” of “The Times” of London on one of our newspapers. This would enlighten the general public on chess and could pave the way for a quarterly Chess (or Intellectual Sport) magazine and draw more sponsorship to Nigerian chess.

Absence of School Chess, Club Competitions
Although there are some chess clubs in the country, they do not organize regular, competitive and financially-rewarding tournaments. It’s great to see chess return to our schools, but I hope there would be much more competitiveness in school chess tourneys in years to come.

The Nigerian Economy
That the economic situation in Nigeria is bad is no longer news. This has in many ways slowed down the progress of chess in Nigeria; so, if chess would grow in Nigeria, it needs to be made financially independent of the Nigerian government. The Nigeria Chess Federation should seek advice from the Scrabble, Taekwando or Table-Tennis organization in the country and find out what they are doing to make progress in these sports despite the fact that Nigeria’s economy is not in the best of states.

In conclusion, it's clear that Nigerian chess has tremendous potential, but it has quite a few cogs in its wheels of progress. From the various problems highlighted above, the recent outing at Algiers 2007 and the prescribed solutions, Nigerian chess still has some catching up to do with the rest of the world. But we can, if we “set forth at dawn”.