Africa-Press – Lesotho. Chess Federation of Lesotho (CFL) acting Public Relations Officer (PRO) Selatela Khiba says the federation has been hosting online tournaments since sports
activities were put on hold amid the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Khiba highlighted in an interview with Informative Sport that they resorted to online games to keep the players active during the COVID-19 induced break.
He further indicated that the biggest tournament that CFL has participated in recently is the International Chess Federation (FIDE) Online Chess Olympiad.
“In this tournament, 190 countries registered with World Chess Federation (WCF)
participated,” Khiba said, adding that the main Chess Olympiad tournament was supposed to be hosted in Russia this month but had to be postponed to next year due to
the worldwide exponential escalation of cases of the pandemic. “The tournament started on July 25th and will end on August 30th, however team Lesotho was defeated in the first stage, the round robin therefore
we failed to qualify for the play-offs,” Khiba said. He further specified that they had friendly tournaments with other countries after being defeated from the Online Chess Olympiad tournament and played against
Libanon. “Libanon qualified for the play-offs unlike our team, but got defeated in the group stages, thus was exempted to play further hence we were able to
score a friendly game with them,” he stated. Khiba also highlighted that the CFL will soon host the National Chess Championships. He said the committee of the federation is yet to organize dates for the
tournament, which might also be hosted online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. According to Khiba Lesotho chess players have been playing online since 2017 way before
the emergence of COVID-19. He however said they were using ancient applications which were not effective enough be utilized to host big tournaments. “Currently online applications that hold meetings
and training sessions are updated. We utilize zoom and others applications to hold association meetings and this makes it easier for our members to communicate
from home or anywhere they are,” he indicated, adding that they also carry their training sessions online and it is easier to discuss chess positions and
to play other games like warm up tournaments against themselves or other countries. “We played with eSwatini just before the Olympiad tournaments, and with
South Africa (SA) and Mozambique during the warm up tournaments,” he said. He however stated that not all players get a chance to play on the online platform because of various reasons that include lack of resources while some are not able to use the online boards.
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