Texas Border Business
By Victoria Brito Morales
RIO GRANDE VALLEY, Texas – The UTTRGV Chess Team has won the Second Annual Kasparov Chess Foundation University Cup for the second year in a row.
The online tournament was held this past weekend, with games played on lichess.org. Nearly 700 participants, making up 146 teams, flocked to the international event hosted on chessstream.com.
This year, the event introduced a team rating cap of 2,400 to level out the competition in early rounds, so no early frontrunner could emerge.
By the end of the competition, it came down to UTRGV A team and UT Dallas A team in the playoffs, with UTRGV finishing in the top spot.
As the victors, UTRGV has earned a training session with legendary world chess champion Garry Kasparov, the namesake of the competition.
“After nine rounds, two teams scored 7.5 out of nine possible points,” said Grandmaster Bartek Macieja, coach of the UTRGV chess team. “The playoff match versus UT Dallas was tense. Our students succeeded in keeping concentration until the very end, eventually winning the match 2.5-1.5”
The winning team included:
- Kamil Dragun, a Master of Business Administration student from Poland (grandmaster).
- Viktor Gazik, a freshman economics major from Slovakia (international master).
- Irakli Beradze, a post-baccalaureate computer engineering major from Georgia (international master).
- Ricardo Peredo, a senior accounting major from Brownsville.
“This is one of the most prestigious university events worldwide, often considered an unofficial world championship,” Macieja said. “Indeed, the vision of a training session with Kasparov, a truly legendary world champion, is what brings hundreds of teams to this competition.”
