Irina Krush

Perelshteyn Racks Up Spice Cup Victory

By IM Irina Krush
February 25, 2008

Eugene Perelshteyn with the trophy that will add a little spice to his life.

Before Susan Polgar brought SPICE to Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas was probably better known to the average chess player as the birthplace of Buddy Holly. Now they’ll know it as the home of the SPICE Cup.

At the opening ceremony of the SPICE Cup, Susan Polgar expressed the wish that it be a “fighting but friendly” tournament, then quickly reversed the order of her words to form what sounded like a more realistic hope: “friendly but fighting.” It’s easier to ask friends to fight rather than ask warriors to be friends, isn’t it? In any case, it turned out that with these words Susan presciently captured the atmosphere of the tournament.

The SPICE Cup (SPICE stands for Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence), held November 9-16, 2007 in Lubbock, Texas, was the brainchild of USCF executive board members Susan and her husband/longtime business partner Paul Truong.

Susan and Paul have recently relocated to Lubbock from Queens, New York to run SPICE at Texas Tech University. With the SPICE Cup, Susan and Paul sought to bring recognition to the institute and its programs, while at the same time giving the U.S. chess community an event it rarely sees: a prestigious all-play-all tournament.

The last times we’ve had a tournament of this caliber include the 2006 Mayor’s Cup in New York (a rapid event), the 2002 Imre Konig Memorial in San Francisco, and, going back even further, the 1996 Chess-in-the-Schools tournament in New York.

The SPICE Cup presented an interesting balance of ethnicities: 40% of the players were native Russian speakers, 40% native Spanish speakers, and the two nonmembers of either group hailed from Europe. And somehow 60% of the field was American. The grandmaster norm was set at 5½/9 for the three international masters (Schneider, Lugo, and myself).

Here is the full article by Irina Krush