The sport of chess in T&T has lost one of its brightest young stars. Eighteen-year-old Fide Master Keron Cabralis, who has established a long list of unprecedented records since he became the national Under-8 champion, has decided to call it quits. His decision seems particularly unfortunate at this time as it includes his unexpected withdrawal from the five-man team chosen to represent the country at the 41st Olympiad at Tromso, Norway, in August.
However painful, Cabralis' departure from the sport he loves is not a singular event in the career of T&T's outstanding youngsters. Eventually, most of these rising stars have had to make the choice between concentrating on the royal game, hoping perhaps to earn a coveted master title, or pursuing their academic studies to join the ranks of the country's professionals.
In the case of young Cabralis, he has decided to withdraw from the Olympiad and from chess in general to focus on his studies.
Over the last ten years or so, since he has been writing a column on chess, DR has known dozens of promising young players who have made the same choice. And while the sport may have lost several potential masters in the process, it may have, on the other hand, served to enhance the mental development of many professionals now serving the society in different productive and beneficial ways, most notably in the fields of law, business and education.
So that while DR may mourn the unexpected departure of Cabralis from the competitive chess arena, he feels confident that the youngster who has so distinguished himself in the celebrated mind game would contribute with equal distinction to the profession he may now choose to pursue.
Cabralis started to accumulate chess records at an early age. At seven, under the tutelage of the T&T Chess Foundation, he became the country's U-8 champion. He proceeded to set a remarkable, perhaps unbreakable, record by winning every age group title, from U-8 to U-18, playing unbeaten in the process.
He eventually capped his junior career by winning the National Junior Championship.
At the World Youth Championships in France, he became the first T&T junior to score more than 50 percent. He won CAC gold in the U-12 category at El Salvador and, two years later, he secured the FM title at the Sub Zonals in Bahamas, and thus became the only T&T player so far to qualify for the Zonals of the world championship.
At 14, Cabralis became youngest ever member of T&T's men Olympiad team. In 2009 and again in 2010, he brought more lustre to the sport by being the first chess player to be named among First Citizens Bank's top ten Youths of the Year.
As is now well recognised, the game of chess can play a positive multifaceted role in the process of education and the creation of a thinking society. As such, DR sincerely hopes that chess would, sooner or later, become a regular activity in our schools. As young Cabralis has come to appreciate, however, the sport in our country cannot as yet provide a viable livelihood for its aficionados, except perhaps in the field of coaching, and even here the opportunities and rewards are still limited.
So that while we grieve over Cabralis' decision, and the loss to the sport it incurs, we must understand it. A young person's destiny is his own to shape. We can only hope that sometime in the future, when his professional ambitions are achieved, his love for the game will lure him back into the tournament arena.
Now, who replaces him on T&T's Olympiad team? No one can seriously argue with the choice of FM Mario Merritt, a player of notable skill, solid achievements and surely the widest experience of Olympiad competition, having represented T&T at four of these world games from 2002 to 2008.
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