The Cinderella Team from Illinois

Webster University Favored to win Final Four … of Chess

To determine the champion, each player will play one player from another team in a round-robin style tournament — three games for each player, a swift and volatile situation.
“It’s a crapshoot … in three rounds, anything could happen,” said Paul Truong, who is one of chess’ fiercest promoters and the husband of Webster Coach Susan Polgar

Expectations are high for Webster — all six players travelling to the Final Four are Grandmasters, and the University’s A & B teams (combined for the Final Four because a school could have only one team) were part of a five-way tie for first. Polgar, a Hungarian child chess prodigy and Grandmaster trailblazer for women in chess, coaches the team or leads the “knights of the round table,” as she calls them.

“All of the eight grandmasters that we have here, they are basically superstars on their right, and national heroes in their own countries,” Polgar said, noting that “the first thing we tell them is that while we certainly respect or support their individual accomplishments or fame, they have to understand that here we work as a team.”

She advises them on chess and helps analyze thousands of opponents’ games, but she claims her main job is preparing the team for competition as a team.

“They all have high egos obviously, because they are superstars, and basically they need to leave their egos at the door.”

While UT-Dallas and UM-Baltimore County have competed in high-level collegiate chess tournaments for several years, Webster’s team is new to the game. Several of its players, as well as Polgar, however, are no strangers to championship collegiate chess.

Several of Webster’s players were Texas Tech University students this time last year, where Polgar coached. As documented in Beacon articles, Polgar and a majority of her top players left Texas Tech for Webster in the past year.

“The two powerhouses in collegiate chess, Baltimore and Dallas, they had won all of the first ten Final Fours, until Texas Tech came on the scene in the last two years when we won those two championships. Before that it was all between Baltimore and Dallas,” Polgar said.
However, four of the Webster students attending the Final Four are freshman, new to the tournament–but certainly not collegiate chess. 

Webster backs their players with scholarship money, sends them across the country and documents them with photo ops. The institution gives credit to a group of athletes performing mentally excruciating work — Polgar noted that the players had put in thousands of hours of preparation over the season, pouring over opponents games and looking for patterns and weaknesses to exploit.

Two hundred miles away, another team is preparing for its first Final Four tournament, yet under very different circumstances. In Champaign, Ill., a collection of freshman and sophomore chess players are without a coach, scholarship money or official institutional backing — but they are Final Four bound regardless.

Eric Rosen, FIDE Master, a former national high school champion and the 9th place finisher at the World Youth Chess Tournament U-18 Chess tournament in 2011, leads the Illinois team in ratings and is the only ranked player on the team.

He rooms with long-time friend and Chess Club President Michael Ozren, and turned down a full-ride scholarship to UT-Dallas, opting to attend Illinois because of its renowned computer science program. At Illinois, he assembled a group of Illinois chess illuminati.

“A lot of the players on our team came from Illinois high school chess, so we were all good friends and knew we were going to U of I together and knew that we wanted to play in the Pan-Ams, so we were able to organize the trip to go,” Rosen said.