Rwanda Chess Federation (Ferwade) has organised an open rapid chess tournament scheduled on Sunday at the College of Science and Technology (CST), former KIST campus, in Kigali. This comes after on Thursday, the federation postponed indefinitely a Chess tournament that had been scheduled to start on Friday with two Kenyan chess clubs participating in addition to the local teams. Fast chess (also known as speed chess) is a type of chess game in which each player is given less time to make their moves than under the normal tournament time controls of 60 to 180 minutes per player. According to the acting Ferwade president, Kevin Ganza, the one-day fast chess tourney will see players tussling it out in 25-minute matches in six rounds after which various cash prizes will be handed out to the best three players. The last such tournament was the June Genocide memorial won by Alexis Ruzigura, one of the country’s eight FIDE rated players. The earlier postponed three-day tournament was being organized by the Kasparov Chess Foundation Africa (KCFA) in collaboration with Ferwade and Chess Kenya. Once it happens, sometime early next year, it will be the first FIDE rated chess tournament in Rwanda. It was postponed after organizers realized – at the last hour – that the requisite number (9) of internationally rated players for the tourney to carry on was not available. Its main goal was to give a FIDE rating to other unrated Rwanda players. Ganza says the tourney is now likely to happen “late in January or beginning of February.”
