Chess team places 6th in Pan Am chess tourney

The UTRGV Chess Team placed sixth in the 2016 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Champions tournament, held Dec. 27-30 in New Orleans.

“There were 60 teams. Our goal was to qualify to the Final Four teams,” Chess Coach Bartek Macieja said. “It is the most prestigious event of the year.”

Last year, the team finished second in the same event.

“We are sixth in the nation, that’s something to be proud of, but I had higher aspirations, higher goals,” Macieja said.

He praised the students’ motivation.

“They were very ambitious, very motivated. They wanted to achieve the goal,” Macieja said.

Team A planned on playing against Webster University’s Team B but, due to changes in the tournament, they played against Webster’s Team A, which, according to Grandmaster Andrey Stukopin, is much stronger than Team B.

“There was two teams playing against each other, [Webster A and Webster B], even if they were [from] the same university,” Stukopin said.

UTRGV Team A played against UT Dallas and then Webster Team A in the last round.

“In the last round, we played against the main favorite, Webster University,” Macieja said. “[Grandmaster Vladimir Belous] tried to win that game. Unfortunately, at one moment, he didn’t see how to win. … We played with the best team in the nation; we were very close to [winning] that match.”

Belous said before the last match, Macieja told him he had to win in order to qualify for the President’s Cup, also known as the Final Four; however, during the last round, the situation changed.

“During the last round, our opponents, they lost their matches. So, during [that] round, our situation was changed. So, we actually just had to make a draw to qualify, but we did not know, so I played like last game,” he said.

Belous said he had a good situation on his board to make a draw, but since he wanted to win, he risked too much.

“He was very ambitious,” Macieja said.

Belous said he was upset about the loss.

“We were stronger,” he said. “We had good chances to beat them but it’s a sport. Some things may happen.”

Stukopin said he still does not understand why the organizers changed the games at the last moment.

“It was very disappointing. I didn’t believe we did not qualify,” he said.  “We had a lot of chances to win; we got unpredictable things.”

The UTRGV Chess Team is currently competing in the World League tournament, which concludes at the end of March.

“The opponents include even the world champion, [Magnus Carlsen of Norway]; that’s the most prestigious league world in this year,” Macieja said.

In other chess news, the Rio Grande Ospreys, a community chess team that includes UTRGV Chess Team members, won their first match, 9.5 to 6.5, last Wednesday against the Las Vegas Desert Rats in the 2017 PRO Chess League.

Guillermo Vazquez, a physics and computer science junior, won all four games, Macieja wrote in an email to The Rider. Vazquez is from Asuncion, Paraguay.

For the Ospreys, Vazquez scored 4 points in four games; Felix Ynojosa, 2 points in four games; Belous, 2 points in four games; and Carlos Hevia, 1.5 points in four games.