Chess team’s second victory is a first

Caltech’s chess team has become the first ever to win the U.S. Amateur Team Championships, considered the country’s most prestigious nonprofessional team chess contest, two years in a row. The winning team—master players Patrick Hummel ’06 (captain) and Eugene Yanayt ’06, Graham Free ’04, and Zhihao (Howard) Liu ’06—went undefeated in their individual matches in the March 20 match, held on the Internet Chess Club website. The victory comes on the heels of their perfect 6–0 score at the Western regional championship in February, which prompted international master Jack Peters to write in the Los Angeles Times, “Baseball fans scream about the New York Yankees, but chess players yearn to break up Caltech.” The team also had to best the Midwest regional winners in the national semifinals before making it to the finals. In 2003, Yanayt, Free, and Liu had joined postdoctoral scholar and master player Wei Ji Ma to win the national championship in the team’s first year of competition.
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