How good are you at chess?
For one Guernsey resident the answer is clear: Good enough to draw with a grandmaster.
Gerda Nevska (38) has been playing chess since she was “six or seven”, but took a fourteen-year break from the game before getting back into it a few years ago.
But despite over a decade off, the Latvian’s skills at the ‘Game of Kings’ don’t seem to have grown too rusty, as she managed to pick up a draw against French grandmaster Bachar Kouatly last weekend.
Mr Kouatly, the first French-Arab player to achieve the grandmaster title, was in Guernsey to play a ‘simultaneous match’ – taking on 13 players at once.
Ms Nevska told Express she had “no nerves” facing the former French Chess Federation President, as she went in with clear tactics in what turned out to be an “interesting game”.
She said it was a “tricky endgame”, but she slightly messed up, so the grandmaster offered her a draw – which she willingly accepted.
‘Fun to watch’
The event at Les Cotils, which also saw Polish grandmaster Radoslaw ‘Radek’ Jedynak compete against the island’s players, had been organised at short notice by Jersey-born chess player and influencer Lula Roberts (28).
She said the “expectation” was that “nobody wins other than Bachar”, but “if somebody’s very impressive, they may sneak a draw”.
“It’s always really fun to watch somebody get a draw in a simul against a grandmaster,” she added.
Miss Roberts, who now lives in Paris, explained the event was dreamed up about a week earlier at a tournament in the French capital, organised by ChessFam.com.
The Guernsey ‘simul’ is part of a UK tour, which included a similar event in Jersey a few days earlier.
Despite the seemingly impossible challenge of playing so many games at once, Miss Roberts explained that grandmasters could rely on their “very good instincts”.
“They’ve also played a lot of chess, so especially for the first part of the game, these openings are going to be very familiar to them,” she said.
She added: “Obviously grandmasters have very, very well‑tuned pattern recognition.
“So these tools really help them, even though they’re playing so many boards at once.”
Having played several grandmasters herself in competitive tournaments, Miss Roberts said it was “always a humbling experience for me”.
She said it was “exciting” to bring ‘simul’ chess to the Channel Islands, as there were “not that many big chess events”, other than the Guernsey Chess Festival – which celebrates its 50th edition later this year – and the Jersey Open, which were both “really good”.
Jonathan Hill, President of the Guernsey Chess Federation, didn’t fare quite as well as Ms Nevska, succumbing to a “quite predictable” defeat, but said it was “fun, nonetheless”.
He said it was “nice to be able to put something on where players of all levels can come along, meet a grandmaster, have a game, chat to them afterwards about the game”.
He hoped the experience would give players “a little bit of inspiration and motivation to keep playing”.
So, what if someone heard about the event and wanted to learn chess or come back to the game?
“Just contact us, send us an email, go on our Facebook or Instagram – or just come along to Les Cotils on a Tuesday evening, and have a chat with someone,” he said.
