Humphrey Andolo – Great Players of the Past

Article by Harry Bairu.

To commemorate the new series on this blog, I am going to start with Humphrey Andolo who won the Kenya National Chess Championship five times in his career (1993, 1995, 1997, 1998 and 1999).

He had an impressive best Elo of 2200 which is 112 points more! than the top rated player in Kenya right now.  With all the advancement in technology and access to chess content online it is amazing that he was able to be so dominant in his time and no one in Kenya is at his best Elo as of writing.

He was a very balanced player in his scores with a 42.9% win rate, 42.9% loss and 14.3% draws  in his total number of games which were forty nine according to ChessBase. This is a decent score when you consider the amount of opposition he was facing. He played in three Chess Olympiads 1998, 2000 and 2008.

His weakest loss is against David J Ireland (1909) and his strongest win is against Joao Paulo Leonardo (2290) which means that most of his opponents were expert level strength of 2000+ which when considering the level of chess expertise in Kenya back then just shows to showcase his amazing talent.

I shall show you below his strongest win and  weakest loss with a summary of his exploits.

Humphrey Andolo v Leonardo Joao Paulo

His opponent was Leonardo Joao Paulo who is a FIDE Master and National Arbiter for his country Portugal.

Humphrey Andolo v David Ireland

Fun Fact

He is the first and only Kenyan player to win a chess event in Uganda. No one else from Kenya has been able to repeat this feat.  The event was the 1997 NRM Pepsi Chess Tournament held in Kampala.