The Barbados chess team has qualified for the 2023 Central American and Caribbean games to be held in El Salvador in June this year.

The team qualified for the championship over the weekend when they played on the online Tornelo platform. The event was a two player team event, played in an Open and female section. It was a rapid event played at the time control of 15 minutes with 30 second increment from move one for each player to complete their moves.

Fifteen teams would qualify from the event in each section to join the host country in the final. Barbados was represented in the Open section by current national champion Fide master Martyn del Castilho and international master Orlando Husbands and by woman candidate master Julissa Figueroa and top junior female player Hannah Wilson.

In the Open section, Barbados finished 11^th place from 20 teams scoring 10 ½ points from a possible 22 points. The players played 11 games each with the sum of  points being the team’s overall tally. Husbands tallied 5  ½ points after some initial connection issues, while Del Castilho score 5 points.

Husbands best result was a draw against  Grandmaster Luis Ibarra Chami of Mexico but he did suffer an upset against St. Lucia junior Nathaniel Mathurin. Del Castilho best result was a draw against Grandmaster Luis Queseda of Cuba. Both players were inconsistent in their efforts but duly completed their qualification. The Cuban team won the event followed by Colombia and Mexico.

In the female section, the Barbados team qualified in 14^th spot with 9 ½ points from the 18 team field. Wilson scored 5 points from 11 and Figueroa scored 4 ½.The Cuban female team dominated the event and won quite easily. Just like the males, the females performed below their initial rankings and both teams will have to take the 5 months or so before the finals to put in some serious work to get into medal contention in the finals.