Chess team wins Kasparov Cup

Brigitte Ortiz | THE RIDER

Last weekend, UTRGV Chess Team A participated and won the Kasparov Chess Foundation University Cup, a prestigious online worldwide international collegiate tournament. 

Over 500 students in 125 teams from 24 countries competed.

According to the tournament regulations, the first-place winners will receive the KCF University Cup and an online team training session with Garry Kasparov, a Russian chess grandmaster and former World Chess champion.

Bartek Macieja, a grandmaster and UTRGV chess coach, said the tournament had strong teams. 

“Everybody wanted to win and everybody wanted to have the training session with Garry Kasparov, which is really an amazing experience for everybody who knows chess, everybody who loves chess,” Macieja said. 

Sanan Syugirov, a business administration graduate student competed with Team A. 

Syugirov said it was interesting to play in a team competition because he had previously played individually. 

“It was very interesting and I am very proud to win that tournament,” he said. “It’s a great achievement for UTRGV.”

Syugirov said he was worried about the way he would play because he did not know what to expect. 

“Then, I saw that I and my teammates played pretty good, and we won the tournament,” he said. 

Syugirov had played chess online before due to the pandemic, so he had some experience. He said it was similar to playing in person. 

“There are some differences in online chess,” Syugirov said. “You should learn to play quicker with your mouse. It’s like maybe a video game. … It’s the main difference. Maybe in online chess, sometimes, [there are] some misclicks. So, there are some differences but because I played previously many games in online chess, I had some experience, and it’s not very difficult for me.”

Asked what his thoughts were about winning a training session with Kasparov, he replied, “For me, it’s unbelievable because Garry Kasparov is the best player of all time and, this training session, I will await it and I don’t know what to say. It’s amazing.”

 Four teams from UTRGV competed. Team A ranked first; B, 18th; C, 42nd; and D, 81st. 

Team D consisted of students from the Mathematics and Science Academy.

“In the fourth section there were 60 teams competing … and they were from 18 different countries,” Macieja said. “We finished 22, which is not so bad. I think it’s also an achievement. Why? Because these guys are young.”

He said the most important thing for Team D was to learn. 

Carlos De Leon, a high school junior in the Mathematics and Science Academy at UTRGV, competed in this competition for the first time. 

The academy is for high school juniors and seniors to learn from UTRGV faculty, alongside UTRGV students, and gain invaluable university experience with heightened supervision and guidance than traditional UTRGV students receive, according to the UTRGV website. 

“It was a lot different than what I’m used to,” De Leon said. “There’s a lot of different steps we had to take to make sure we weren’t cheating and whatnot. But over the actual tournament, which was pretty big, you get to play against people from all around the world. I thought that was cool.”

He said he was worried about being rusty because he had not been to a chess tournament in over a year. 

“I guess I was just worried I wouldn’t remember what to do,” De Leon said. “And I did have a rough start at the beginning but I was able to smooth it out at the end.” 

He said this tournament was a huge stepping-stone to continue playing chess because since the pandemic started, it was hard to stay focused.

“You were thinking you weren’t going to a chess tournament in a while but this tournament kind of brought you back into that [connection with] chess, and I feel ready to play more chess tournaments now,” De Leon said.

Macieja said their next big competition is the World Championships in March. 

“We will definitely be practicing but also practicing [in] some other training tournaments, less important events,” he said. “We’ve already done a lot this year, starting from January. In 10 days, we will be competing in our fifth event.” 

Macieja said he believes they have good chances to place high in the World Championship.

“I don’t want to say how high; it’s very difficult,” he said. “Again, this is the world championship, so all the best teams in the world can participate. For sure, there will be many, many strong teams.