UTD Chess Team Ties for First in Tournament

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (Dec. 29, 2001) – For the second year in a row, The University of Texas at Dallas tied for first place Saturday in the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, the top college chess tournament held in the Western Hemisphere.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, shared top honors in the prestigious four-day tournament, which was held at the Providence Marriott Hotel.

The UTD and UMBC “A” Teams each amassed 5 1/2 match points during the tournament. UTD won five of its six matches and tied in games, 2-2, in its head-to-head match with UMBC.

Tied for third place with four match points were Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the UTD and UMBC “B” Teams. A team from the University of Chicago finished next with 3 1/2 points.

“I am very proud of both of our teams,” said Dr. Alexey Root, associate director of UTD’s Chess Program. “They represented the university extremely well. To have one team tie for first and the other tie for third is rather remarkable considering the high quality of the competition.”

In recent years, UTD and UMBC have developed an intense chess rivalry and have emerged as unquestionably the two best college chess teams in the United States. The two tied at last year’s Pan Am Tournament in Milwaukee, and last spring UTD barely edged UMBC in the “Final Four of Chess” competition in Dallas.

In Providence, UMBC actually outscored UTD in game points, 18 1/2 to 18, but under U.S. Chess Federation rules, the two universities are considered co-champions. Last year in Milwaukee, the situation was reversed, with UTD winning the so-called “tie-breaker” on game points, 19 1/2 to 16.

Six weeks ago, UTD became the first university ever to hold an international chess tournament sanctioned by the world governing body of chess, FIDE (Federation Internationale des Echecs). UTD was able to do so because it had the top-ranked collegiate chess team in the United States (a team with two grandmasters and one international master) and had players from more than the four countries FIDE required to sanction an international tournament. In fact, players from seven countries participated in the UTD Chess Championship.

Earlier in the year, UTD was named “Chess College of the Year” by the U.S. Chess Federation.

The players representing UTD’s “A” Team at the Pan Am were Yuri Shulman, Marcin Kaminski, Andrew Whatley, David John, Andrei Zaremba and Dennis Rylander. The UTD “B” Team was composed of Marvin Huckaby, Andrey Dokuchayev, Katie Roberts-Hoffman, Katya Ushakova, Enrique Rios and Jeff Ashton.