Photo Courtesy Bartek Macieja
Sol Garcia | THE RIDER
After winning an international collegiate tournament, UTRGV Chess Team A earned a virtual training session with Garry Kasparov, a Russian grandmaster and chess legend, the team’s coach said.
The inaugural Kasparov Chess Foundation University Cup, held virtually Feb. 6 and 7, had over 500 students in 125 teams from 24 countries participate, with UTRGV Team A placing first.
“The first prize of the tournament was the possibility of having a training session with Garry Kasparov, which everybody dreams of,” said Bartek Macieja, grandmaster and UTRGV chess coach. “It’s like having a basketball training session with Michael Jordan.”
Right after the tournament, the excited Team A started to prepare for the training session on March 3, Macieja said.
The four players who competed in the KCF University Cup selected plays from the competition and other tournaments and provided analyses on them to present to Kasparov. In turn, Kasparov selected two from each player, so eight games could be demonstrated in the training session.
Photo Courtesy Bartek Macieja
“Of course, if you want to [send analyses] to the world’s champion, you need to make good [analyses],” Macieja said. “You cannot just send in anything, so that was serious work.”
The team and coach expected Kasparov would spend about half an hour or so with them, but to their surprise, Kasparov met with the team for about four hours to share advice and experiences, Macieja said.
“He was ready to come and give his opinion about some hints [on] what to do, what not to do, what should have been done and some practical advice,” he said. “[As] one of our students would be demonstrating his game, Garry Kasparov was giving feedback, but [if] other students had some additional remarks, questions, comments, they were also free to ask during the session at any moment.”
The training session was an “amazing experience” for Sanan Syugirov, a grandmaster from Team A and business administration graduate student.
“[Kasparov’s] one of the greatest players of history, and he’s also one of my favorite players,” Syugirov said. “Many people want to talk with Garry because he has so much wisdom in chess.”
When analyzing Syugirov’s games, Kasparov helped him learn from his mistakes.
“He saw my mistakes,” he said. “It was great because he … talked to me that in some position[s], I played well, or maybe I played bad.”
Syugirov said the most exciting part of the training session was seeing “how Garry understands chess, how he sees all [of] the board and pieces.”
Team A’s reserve player Irakli Beradze, who substitutes for the others when necessary, could not play a game during the training session because there was no opponent for him, but he got to participate in discussion.
“We were analyzing [games] together, and [Kasparov] was sharing his thoughts and his experience,” said Beradze, an international master and post baccalaureate undergraduate. “That was amazing.”
When he was 12, Beradze and nine others played against Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition, but this was a new and different encounter, he said.
“[It’s] completely different when such a great player shares his experience,” the sophomore said. “You can actually see how he thinks, and how he is really doing, and how he’s really playing chess. It’s [an] amazing experience.”
The fact that UTRGV won the training session reflects greatly on UTRGV, Beradze said.
“Our university became more famous now,” he said. “Many other universities know our name, and they even [may be] afraid of our teams, sometimes,” he said with a laugh.
Beradze said Macieja should be credited for helping make this happen.
“We should give credit [to] our Coach Bartek for that because he’s [a] great coach and great manager, too,” he said.
