Susan Polgar & Texas Tech Chess Day

Zach Long / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Grandmaster Zoltan Almasi of Hungary makes a move during his match against Grandmaster Eugene Perelshteyn of the United State during the opening round of the SPICE Cup on Thursday at Texas Tech.

By Matthew McGowan
Avalanche-Journal

The eyes of millions of chess enthusiasts around the world will be on Lubbock and Texas Tech for the next two weeks.

The international spotlight flipped on Thursday when some of the game’s most iconic names shook hands with each other in the university’s Student Union Building and slid their first piece forward.

With that, one of the year’s most notable chess tournaments was born.

Lubbock Mayor Tom Martin stepped away from a City Council meeting to make an appearance at the tournament’s opening ceremony, where he declared Oct. 28, 2010, Lubbock’s official “Susan Polgar & Texas Tech Chess Day.”

The university’s Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence has lured some big names from seven countries to this year’s fourth annual SPICE Cup on campus.

Martin welcomed the esteemed players to Lubbock, a “very, very friendly town,” before showing them how to get their guns up.

“That’s what we do at the basketball, football and all the games,” he said, “and we need to do it at the chess tournaments.”

Topping the list of the players in town is 17th-highest-rated player in the world, Hungarian grandmaster Zoltan Almasi.

Also listed on the tournament’s roster are, to borrow from the parlance of the sports world, a handful of the game’s bright young things.

Like Filipino grandmaster Wesley So, 17, who in 2007 clinched a spot as the seventh-youngest player to earn a grandmaster title.
He was barely 14 years old at the time.

Or there’s 13-year-old Darwin Yang of Plano, who is on the brink of earning the international master title, possibly by the tournament’s end on Nov. 7.

University officials weren’t shy about the tournament’s prestige, nor did they mince their words about the enormous exposure the tournament offers Texas Tech.

Tens of millions of players worldwide are expected to follow the tournament online.

Juan Munoz, Tech’s vice president for institutional diversity and vice provost for undergraduate education, was busy Thursday luring the tournament’s younger players to Tech.

Chancellor Kent Hance’s office is offering a $1,000 scholarship to its top high school upperclassman finisher.

Jodey Arrington, Hance’s chief of staff, said Tech is “truly becoming the epicenter for chess competition and chess excellence around the world.”

And he gave much of the credit to Polgar, a Hungarian-born chess legend who founded the local institute five years ago.

Today, it’s considered the only one of its kind.

“When I’m around Susan,” Arrington said, “I feel like I’m in the presence of greatness.”

Source: Avalanche Journal