Elite Chess Teams Reach Final Four, Which Should Be a Quiet Affair
By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN
MARCH 28, 2015
Elite college basketball programs are battling in the N.C.A.A. tournament this weekend to reach the Final Four. For fans of chess, the top four teams are squaring off now.
Called the Final Four, in homage to its more famous cousin, or the President’s Cup, after the trophy that goes to the winning team, the chess competition is usually scheduled on the same weekend as the men’s basketball championship and has been held each year since 2001, pitting the top four teams from the annual Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship in December.
The competition was moved up a week this year because of a scheduling conflict with the United States Chess Championships, which begins this week in St. Louis and will include some of the college players competing this weekend.
This year, as in 2014, the tournament is being held at the New York Athletic Club.
Unlike in basketball, the chess Final Four is a round-robin competition, in which each four-player team (with up to two alternates) gets a crack at all its rivals. At the end of the weekend, the team with the best record is declared the winner.
There are two rounds Saturday and one Sunday, when, in accordance with tradition, the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds face off.
“It is a short competition,” said Susan Polgar, a former women’s world champion who is the coach of Webster University of St. Louis, the top seed. “In shorter competitions, there is more randomness.”
With a total of 17 grandmasters and five international masters spread among the finalists, all the teams are good enough to win, said Al Lawrence, the director of the program at Texas Tech, the No. 3 seed.
“It is an any-given-Sunday kind of thing,” Lawrence said, using a football reference for evenly matched competition.
Jim Stallings, the director of the University of Texas at Dallas chess program, said that this weekend’s competition would very likely be a close one.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it go down to the last game,” he said.
Although the tournament shares the name of the basketball competition, the similarities end there.
There are no screaming fans or large crowds, just a handful of people watching in silence so as not to break the players’ concentration. Cellphones are turned off, and a player who forgets to do so can be forced to forfeit. Bystanders who break the cellphone rule are shown the door.
There are also no cheerleaders, bands or mascots — at least during the competition. (Texas-Dallas, which is known as a research and engineering university, had a large pep rally Tuesday for its team, the No. 2 seed.)
The coaches do not strain their vocal cords screaming at referees or players so much as they wear down their cuticles, nervously watching games in which they cannot offer advice.
Webster University and Polgar are the closest that college chess has to basketball’s Kentucky Wildcats and to Mike Krzyzewski, the Duke coach. Webster has won the past two Final Fours, although it was nearly upset in the final round last year by Texas Tech. Polgar guided Texas Tech to the title in 2011 and 2012 before she switched universities.
Full article here.