Knight Raider Shines on the World Stage

News Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DATE: Nov. 16, 2011

CONTACT: Karin Slyker, karin.slyker@ttu.edu

(806) 742-2136

Knight Raider Shines on the World Stage

Grandmaster Georg Meier, co-captain of the Texas Tech University Knight Raiders, has defeated a former top 10 world professional chess player, Sergei Movsesian of Armenia. The win came in the final round of the 2011 European Team Championship.

Meier, a freshman from Germany, tied for second place last month in the 2011 SPICE Cup at Texas Tech, along with Cuban Grandmaster Leinier Doniguez, a former World Blitz champion.

Meier also tied for first and beat Grandmaster Le Quang Liem of Vietnam in the playoff at the 2011 SPICE Cup Blitz Championship.

“One of the top young talents in the world, Meier is the best German-born player in the past two decades,” said Paul Truong, marketing director for the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE). “Last year, he decided to give up his very lucrative professional career with Baden Baden, the top club team in Chess Bundesliga, to join the SPICE program at Texas Tech.”

He is now being trained by Grandmaster Susan Polgar, winner of four Women’s World Championships and five Olympiad Gold Medals.

Meier will play board one for the Texas Tech Knight Raiders, the No. 1 ranked collegiate team in the nation with four Grandmasters, at the 2011 PanAm Collegiate Championship in Dallas in December. He will also lead the Knight Raiders in their title defense at the 2012 Final Four in Washington, D.C.

Full standings of the 2011 European Team Championship can be found here: http://euro2011.chessdom.com/etcc-2011-standings-open-section.

A photo of Meier and Polgar is available here: https://picasaweb.google.com/SPICEChess/0SPICECup2011B#5667585805572112706

Find Texas Tech news, experts and story ideas at www.media.ttu.edu and on Twitter @TexasTechMedia.

CONTACT: Paul Truong, director of marketing, SPICE, Texas Tech University, (806) 742-7742, or paul.truong@ttu.edu.

SPICE in Texas gets U.S. out of chess backwater

SANDS: SPICE in Texas gets U.S. out of chess backwater
By David R. Sands
The Washington Times
Tuesday, November 1, 2011

We can claim the Super Bowl, the World Series and three of golf’s four “majors,” and we have played host to eight Olympics. But when it comes to staging big-time chess events, the U.S. is something of a backwater.

The 1995 Kasparov-Anand match at New York's World Trade Center was the first world championship played on American soil in 88 years. The most storied U.S. tournaments - Cambridge Springs 1904, New York 1924, New York 1927, Santa Monica 1966 - occurred decades ago. On the topographical chess atlas of the world, obscure burgs such as Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands; Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia; and Linares, Spain, tower over New York and Los Angeles.

So for patriotic reasons if nothing else, it’s nice to report on the fifth annual SPICE Cup, staged last month in Lubbock, Texas, by Texas Tech University and the Susan Polgar Foundation. The strongest of the three round-robin invitationals there had an average rating of 2656 and docked in as a Category 17 event.

In the hard-fought Group A event, rising Vietnamese star GM Le Quang Liem justified his 2710 top rating by eking out a victory over Cuban GM Leinier Dominguez Perez and German GM Georg Meier. Israeli GM Anatoly Bykhovsky and Italian IMRoberto Mogranzini shared top honors in Group B, and popular U.S. GM Ben Finegold finished alone in first in Group C.

Liem needed a last-round victory over Dominguez Perez, who beat him in the first half of the tournament, to secure first place. He pulled it off - just barely.

Full article here.