Caltech chess team triumphs

After a victory over MIT in their Internet match on March 2, Caltech’s fledgling chess team, bearing the suitably techie name of “CALTECHnically Won,” triumphed over other regional winners to gain the U.S. Amateur Team Chess Championship. The win gives Caltech “the most prestigious team chess championship title in the United States,” according to freshman Patrick Hummel, the club’s president. The matches were played on the U.S. Chess Federation’s online server.

The triumphant team consisted of postdoc Wei Ji (Whee Ky) Ma, freshman Eugene Yanayt, junior Graham Free, and freshman Howard (Zhihao) Liu, all of them members of the Caltech Chess Club.

The club was founded at the beginning of the 2002–03 academic year by Hummel, Ma, Yanayt, and Free. Lectures by Hummel, who is a master player, have attracted a lot of interest, and the club has grown to a membership of 49. Early this year, teams from the club began to prove themselves with strong results in competition against other teams. The ambitious group won the U.S. Amateur Team West Chess Championship over the President’s Day weekend, which put them up against the other regional champs in the finals.

The intervening win over MIT prompted praise from President David Baltimore, who wrote: “Patrick—I am writing . . . to congratulate you and the rest of the team on your historic victory over MIT. Chess is a quintessentially Caltech sport and it is terrific that in its first year, our team has done so well.”

In the championship finals, Caltech ultimately faced the team from the University of Texas at Dallas, which was ranked second in the country among collegiate chess teams. (The U.S. Amateur Team competitions are not limited to collegiate teams.) Two early losses for Caltech meant that players Free and Ma would have to win their games if they were to save the match. Free won using an advantageous endgame, while Ma gradually outplayed his opponent to tie the match at 2-2, forcing a playoff. Another tie forced a second playoff.

The final playoff was the most dramatic match of all. With the score tied, it looked as if Ma might be forced to opt for a draw. With less than 30 seconds remaining for each player, Ma found a sequence of moves that gave Caltech’s team the final victory it needed to take the match and the national championship.

The chess club meets for recreational and competitive play every Friday from 8 to 10:30 p.m. in the Page House kitchen. It is open to players of all levels of skill and from every sector of the Caltech community. Among the members are master players Hummel, Ma, and Sergiy Vasylkevych, a grad student at Caltech.
•