Illya Nyzhnyk wins Spice Cup 2014
by Sagar Shah
10/29/2014 – SPICE stands for Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, and has made Webster University in St. Louis, USA, a hotbed of chess talent. Players from all over the globe play and study there, and the participants of the Spice Cup 2014 showed high international standard. The event was won by former child prodigy Illya Nyzhnyk, now a ripe 18 year of age.
The SPICE Cup 2014 was held from the 21st to 26th October 2014 in Saint Louis, Missouri. The event was sponsored by the Webster University along with Susan Polgar Foundation.
The two sponsors for the event are the Webster University along with the initiative SPICE (Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence), which relocated in February 2012 from Texas University to Webster University, along with all the members of the reigning National Collegiate Chess team. The two have formed a deadly duo: ever since they joined hands the Webster Chess team has been ranked number one in Division College Chess and it has never relinquished its top billing.
It was natural that when their own university was sponsoring the event, the top Webster players would play in it. Hence, the Spice Cup 2014 kicked off with a 2700 player being the top seed: GM Le Quang Liem (2706). GM Ray Robson with a rating of 2628 was the second seed of the event.
The tournament was a nine round Swiss event with a time control of 90 minutes plus 30 second increment from move one. There were double rounds on three days, which made the tournament quite a hectic one. The best part about the tournament was that it boasted an extremely strong line-up of young players, like Vasif Durarbayli, Illya Nyzhnyk, Daniel Naroditsky, Kayden Troff and many more. There were just 50 players, but amongst them were twelve GMs, nine IMs and 16 FMs. Only a handful of players in the tournament were untitled. The average rating of the event was 2296. These statistics just show how strong the event was.
Full article here.
16 year old Safal Bora (IM norm), 15 year old Razvan Preotu (GM norm), Kostya Kavutskiy (IM norm)
All photos here: https://picasaweb.google.com/116302832360230031699/SPICECup2014
Go Illia!