Chess Program Names President’s Cup-Winning Player as New Coach

At the 2024 President’s Cup at The University of Texas at Dallas, Mikhail Antipov sat at the final board in play, where he held on for a draw to earn the University of Missouri’s first national chess championship.

A year later, Antipov is back at UT Dallas, the scene of this triumph, with a different objective: Antipov is the new coach for the Comets chess program, working with program director Julio Catalino Sadorra BS’13 to lift UTD back to the top of the collegiate chess landscape.

“We are excited to welcome Grandmaster Mikhail Antipov to the UTD chess program,” Sadorra said. “His deep chess expertise, international competitive success and commitment to excellence will be a tremendous asset to our team. With his guidance, I’m confident our current and future chess scholars will reach new heights in their development.”

“His deep chess expertise, international competitive success and commitment to excellence will be a tremendous asset to our team. With his guidance, I’m confident our current and future chess scholars will reach new heights in their development.”

Julio Catalino Sadorra BS’13, director of the UT Dallas chess program

A Moscow native, Antipov became the youngest grandmaster in Russia at age 16 in 2013. Shortly thereafter, he won the 2015 Under-20 World Junior Chess Championship. Now 28, he’s still competing as well as coaching. Antipov won the 50th annual World Open in Philadelphia in 2022 and tied for first at the U.S. Masters in both 2022 and 2023, claiming the trophy via tiebreaker in 2023.

“Chess was a very important part of my life even before elementary school,” he said. “I started playing when I was 5 years old and quickly started competing seriously. When I was 6, I won the Moscow Under-8 Championship; by the time I was 10, I was playing professionally and working with Grandmaster Sergey Dolmatov, a famous coach.”

In recent years, Antipov has coached American Grandmaster Fabiano Caruana, now ranked fourth in the world, in preparation for the U.S. Chess Championship, and served as the main coach of the U.S. team at last year’s Chess Olympiad, where the squad rallied from an early upset loss to Ukraine to finish second out of 188 teams, behind only India.

“Coaching is completely different from being a professional chess player. At this level, it’s very individualized; each player has different weaknesses to work on,” Antipov said. “My experience teaching younger students has helped me learn to be a better teacher — how to explain things so that someone understands you. This is the biggest challenge for a pro chess player who wants to be a coach: However good you are as a player, you still might not be good at conveying ideas.”

Antipov said the goal at UT Dallas is and always will be first place in the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship and the President’s Cup. He said there were two main factors that set the Comets apart from the other elite programs.

“The biggest differences from an outsider’s perspective are that there are more players in the UT Dallas program, and that studying here is more serious and more time-consuming,” Antipov said. “In collegiate chess, balancing chess work with academics can be a serious challenge. Having competed in college recently myself, I hope I’m able to assist my students in time management as well.”

Antipov said he enjoys living in the Dallas area and that the many trees on the UTD campus made walking pleasant even in the early summer heat. He said that the Metroplex is a good size for him between his collegiate playing days in Columbia, Missouri, and the sprawling Moscow of his youth.

“I like big cities more, I guess, and Dallas is a good size for me; New York is a bit too stressful,” he said. “Dallas is a perfect middle ground between Moscow and smaller places.”