Virginia Tech Memorial Fund Chess Tournament

Brian Salomon asked that we publish the following letter...

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Dear BCC members and chess enthusiasts,

The Chess Club of Virginia Tech kindly requests your support and participation in its October 13 and 14 tournament commemorating the 32 lives lost and 25 injured persons in the April 16 massacre. To our knowledge, this will be the first sporting-type event to be held with all proceeds going to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund. Your contributions are welcome in any form:

- chess sets and clocks to accommodate new players
- lectures and exhibitions from talented players
- corporate sponsorship
- donated items for a possible silent auction

The entire student center is reserved for the occasion, including an 88 seat lecture hall. Local hotels and restaurants are discounting rates for participants. Media attention will be strong so this is a great chance to promote your organization.

Most of all, we want you there as a chess player. Details for players will be forthcoming from the USCF and the Virginia Chess Federation.

To become involved, please contact Chuck Ronco, hokiechem -at- yahoo.com, or respond here and I'll answer what I can.

Respectfully yours,
Brian Salomon

It's always closer than you think

I've been away for awhile and just got a chance to read this e-mail from Brian Salomon:

Members of the chess community may wish to know that Derek O'Dell, friend and active President of the Chess Club of Virginia Tech, is recovering after the shootings Monday.

Derek notified the chess club:

hey everyone, i'm doing ok. I was shot once in the arm. I was in Norris 207 in a german class when the incident occurred. Thank you all very much for your prayers, wishes, messages, and thoughts. I love you all very much and I'm very fortunate to be here still with all of you.

Love,
Derek

My apologies if this has already been covered elsewhere in the blogosphere, as it will take me some time to get through the 800 or so posts waiting for me in Bloglines.

A Master's degree with a minor in Chess

If you want to earn an MBA from Virginia's Hampton University you're going to have to learn to play chess.

Chess is more than fun to first-year students in Hampton's five-year MBA program. It's part of the curriculum. A third of the course Critical Analysis and Strategy is devoted to learning and playing it.

After experimenting with chess in business administration classes for more than a decade, [Sid Howard] Credle[, dean of Hampton University's business school,] formally incorporated it in 2000 into the new MBA program, whose graduates finish with both bachelor's and master's degrees.

The game is a way to teach critical thinking and strategic skills in a dynamic environment.

Just as in, well, the business world.

So who is this Sid Credle guy?

...a past national champion in one of the lower ratings...

Here's his USCF rating card. It's hard to tell from his tournament history where the "past national champion" title came from. Though if you'd like to meet Sid, it looks like you'd have a pretty good shot at it at this year's Foxwoods Open.

Poor Harvard

Believe it or not, I'm actually starting to feel bad for Harvard University. It's hard to come across a mention of the Pan-Am Collegiate Chess Championships which doesn't mention that this or that school beat/ out-scored the Crimson. The idea that "all things being equal" Harvard should have the best chess team in the nation is, of course, absurd. Harvard doesn't recruit chess players, and while they do attract high achieving high school students there's no reason to think that their entering class should have a disproportionate share of outstanding chess players. We have some folks from Harvard who play at the club but they definitely don't constitute all the best players.

Nevertheless, if your chess team beats Harvard you'll hear it shouted from the rooftops. This time it's the press in Miami lauding the accomplishments of Miami Dade College. The article includes a nice video which is well worth watching (though I should point out that the University of Texas Longhorns did not qualify for the College World Series of Chess -- UTD's nickname is the Comets).

University of Maryland, Warsaw County

What with red shirt freshman, no show classes and "special" tutoring, big time college athletics strays far from the ideal of inter-school amateur competition. While most everyone knows that this is the case when watching football, basketball and hockey there's been little mainstream discussion of the problems which have plagued college chess. Instead, most of the coverage of college championships over the past few years has used the "little school from nowhere beats Harvard" theme. Of course the "little school", more often than not, is from Baltimore or Dallas.

This article in the Washington Post on the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship starts with the same "beating up on the Ivies" premise, but does afford a couple of paragraphs to the somewhat questionable practices which were used to build UMBC and UTD into chess powerhouses:

The room is thick with tension and intrigue, born partly of the controversy that has surrounded some of the more excessive recruiting practices. As recently as three years ago, several teams, particularly UMBC and UT Dallas, were paying full scholarships, plus cash stipends, to grandmasters as old as 40. Players had nominal course loads and took as long as eight years to graduate.

The overlords of collegiate chess introduced reforms, including a rule against grandmasters over age 25, a six-year limit on competing and a requirement that players maintain a grade-point average of at least 2.0 and at least a half-time course schedule. But UMBC and UT Dallas have stayed dominant by recruiting players from countries including Russia, Poland and India. UMBC's top two players are over 25, grandfathered in under the old rules.

Some players still think the game is rigged. "It's just buying players and championships, and that's not appropriate," said Johnny Sadoff, a Harvard student from Silver Spring. "They should be legitimate students."

A new recruiting tool for college athletics

From Checkmate: Wolverines bond through chess at The Michigan Daily:

Ever wonder the real reason running back Mike Hart decided to come to Michigan?

Ask Leon Hall, and he'll point to a game they played when Hart visited Ann Arbor on his recruiting trip.

Chess.

"(When Leon pulled out the board) I thought he was real smart, but then I learned he didn't really know how to play," Hart joked at Michigan Media Day. "He thought it was checkers."

Hart emphasized the fact that he beat Hall. But the cornerback spins a different tale from their first match.

"He beat me once, but I won the series," Hall said. "We played three games. I know I won the series. He beat me. He's not lying to you, he beat me, but if he was 1-4, what was that? He won a game, but he lost the other four."

The NCAA has promised an investigation into how Hart went 1-4 in three games.

An idea to reduce truancy

There is no longer a need to skip classes and studying in order to play chess. Symbiosis University in Pune, India has launched a three-year diploma in the royal game. The course of study is being developed with the support of "Grandmaster Abhijeet Kunte, Mrunalinee Aurangabadkar, Chandrashekhar Gokhale and yoga experts Dr Nitin Unkule and Dr Bhaskar Shejwal..." As for the teaching staff, "...students [will] learn ... from reputed chess players..." Unfortunately, The article doesn't explain the hiring criteria for "reputed chess players."