Knight Raiders address rumors, issues regarding move to Webster University

Knight Raiders address rumors, issues regarding move to Webster University
Posted: Monday, April 23, 2012 8:48 pm
By Nicole Molter
Staff Writer
Daily Toreador - Dept. of Student Media, Texas Tech University

Nine of the current Knight Raiders will transfer to Webster University in St. Louis with Susan Polgar, director of Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, and Paul Truong, director of marketing for SPICE, in June.

The players staying behind said they are sad to see these members go, but are optimistic about the future of chess at Texas Tech.

“I’ve spoken to the group on several occasions,” said Juan Muñoz, vice provost for undergraduate education. “I’ve assured them that chess is going to continue at Texas Tech. We plan to hire very, very highly accomplished people, and we plan to be competitive. We plan to continue to recruit students to play and to attend Texas Tech and to be exceptional students and equally accomplished players.”

There has been some confusion about the continuation of the chess at Tech and funds available to the program, said Brett James, a junior from Richmond with a concentration in pre-med.

“A lot of the papers that have been coming out lately – it got picked up by over 500 ones across the U.S., like ESPN, Yahoo, Associated Press, NPR News, New York Times, Wall Street (Journal), all these big newspaper articles, some even foreign – basically they’re saying the wrong thing,” James said.

There will be a team for the fall, he said. More than half of the current team is staying. A new director, coach and outreach coordinator will be hired. An outreach coordinator is a full-time position the team has never had before.

“I have formed a search committee,” Muñoz said, “which is comprised of staff and students. It’s chaired by our vice provost, former U.S. ambassador, Tibor Nagy. They’ve been meeting for weeks and have already identified three finalists (for coach).”

The team will have more scholarship funds than ever before, Muñoz said. A recent private pledge of approximately $280,000 will be divided during the course of four years. The program also has about $50,000 in annual permanent institutional dollars for scholarships.

The team has a separate operational budget he said, which will be used for transportation, food and hotel expenses.

“The money we have right now is good enough to fill the team that has already won the title twice,” James said. “It’s just not enough for maybe twice the size and more Grandmasters to keep coming, like the team was becoming. So Webster wants to have that, and that’s great but, you know, they’re a private school. They can have a little bit more money than Tech can, but Tech definitely has enough support here to have a championship team just like they did the last two years.”

Trey Modlin, a freshman undeclared major from Shaker Heights, Ohio, is confident about the Knight Raiders growing as a team. People are attracted to the school as much as they are to the chess program, he said.

Modlin visited the campus and the chess team before making the decision to come to Tech.

“I didn’t feel overwhelmed by being there,” he said, “and (the chess team) even let me get in on some training, so I wasn’t just being an observer.”

The interest in the chess program is growing in schools, James said. The Knight Raiders hosted the fifth annual Lubbock Open at the Science Spectrum in January.

“We used rooms that we’ve never had before with like 100 students in there by itself,” he said. “All the tournaments are over 100 students now. When I first got here there were like 70 to 80.”

The team may not be as competitive with the loss of the top players, James said.

“It’s definitely going to be a transition year,” he said, “kind of like the football team where we switched from Mike Leach. Now we have (head football coach Tommy) Tuberville.”

Replacing such a good coach is hard, James said. A lot of people are doubtful right now, but the team has a lot to look forward to in the next year starting with our practices in early September.

“(Susan) has incredible knowledge of chess,” he said. “She’s a good coach, but everybody has their own perspective. There’s all kinds of great coaches out there. We’re going to have another strong coach in the fall and we plan to keep winning titles, too. Basically, we want the campus to be confident and support us, just realize that we’re here.”

Source: http://www.dailytoreador.com

Tech Knight Raiders win second national championship

Tech Knight Raiders win second national championship, prep for move to St. Louis
By Nicole Molter
Staff WriterDaily Toreador - Dept. of Student Media, Texas Tech University
Posted: Tuesday, April 3, 2012 10:01 pm

Susan Polgar, head coach of the Knight Raiders and director of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, led the Texas Tech chess team to a second win at the Final Four national competition in Washington D.C.

Polgar is the first woman in history to lead a men’s Division I team to two straight national championships.

“It feels really good,” Polgar said. “We proved ourselves that last year was not an accident.”

The competition began Friday and concluded Sunday, with the Knight Raiders claiming the title of the country’s top intercollegiate team at the President’s Cup, the main Final Four of College Chess event.

“It was a really close competition between UT Dallas and UMBC,” Polgar said. “We scored eight points and UT and UMBC tied second with seven-and-a-half. We just won by half a point.”

Anatoly Bykhovsky, a sophomore finance major from Israel, said UT Dallas and UMBC were tough competitors, but it felt great to have finished in first place, despite the closeness of the competition.

Andre Diamant, a sophomore economics major from Brazil, competed at nationals with the team last year, as well.

“This year was harder,” he said. “I played the last game and I had a worse position. I needed to draw this game so the team gets to be a champion.”

Bykhovsky, Diamant, Georg Meier, a freshman finance major from Germany, and Elshan Mordiabadi, a business graduate student from Iran, participated in the tournament. Denes Boros, a sophomore psychology major from Hungary, and Vitaly Neimer, a freshman finance major from Israel, were two alternates who also attended.

After this year, all eight members of the “A” team, including Diamant and Bykhovsky, will be transferring with Polgar to Webster University in St. Louis this fall.

“The SPICE team, as you know, many of them are transferring to Webster University, along with the SPICE program,” Polgar said, “but the SPICE team is trying to win, of course, in the future as well. I know we have many competitors in the future.”

According to the Webster University Chess website, the university previously has never had a chess team on campus. Better funding provides opportunities to maintain the high level of the SPICE program and recruitment of student players.

“For the first four years of the program, we basically relied on a large donation from one generous donor to fund a little bit more than four full scholarships which is equivalent to $80,000 per year,” Polgar said.

The money was divided between 21 students currently in the SPICE program, she said. The donation was running out, which would prevent many of the Division I National Championship team members from graduating.

“My family and I are very fond of Lubbock and Texas Tech and we would have loved to have the opportunity to remain with Tech for years to come,” Polgar said. “But the welfare of my students comes first and that is why I had to look for various alternatives for them. They played their hearts out for me and I had to make sure that they all can graduate from school.”

SPICE would have preferred to stay at Tech, Polgar said.

“Only after SPICE and the entire Division I national championship team made a commitment to move to Webster University, we got the news that the donor agreed to continue the funding,” she said. “In addition, Texas Tech also decided to allocate a substantial amount of money for annual chess scholarships. If this would have happened timely, the entire team and the SPICE program would have remained at Texas Tech.”

Polgar said the Knight Raiders would have no trouble securing funding after her leave. She said she currently does not know who will take her place.

“The new director of the Texas Tech chess program and the new head coach will have more institutional scholarship dollars next year than what I had in the entire first four years,” she said. “I hope that with the abundant scholarship budget starting next year, the Knight Raiders will continue to thrive and make the Final Four next year to defend its title and for many more years after that.”

Webster University is located in St. Louis, home to the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis, the World Chess Hall of Fame and U.S. Championship Chess. St. Louis is an area rich in chess history, which will provide a welcoming atmosphere for the SPICE program.

Under the coaching of Polgar, the chess team won a total of 15 national, two state and two regional titles in four years, qualifying for the Final Four each year when competing in Division I and winning back-to-back Final Four titles.

“Texas Tech now has a serious reputation of excellence in the chess community,” Polgar said. “This should make the recruiting process of chess stars and superstars much easier than when we began from scratch in the fall of 2007. I am very thankful for the opportunity to be a part of this wonderful institution in the past five years. It has been an incredible experience and we made a lot of history together.”

Source: http://www.dailytoreador.com

Knight Raiders earned top spot at Southwest Collegiate

Chess team earns first place in Southwest tourney
Posted: Monday, February 20, 2012 11:51 pm
dailytoreador.com

The Texas Tech Knight Raiders, under the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, claimed the top spot at the 2012 Southwest Collegiate Championship on Sunday in Dallas.

The University of Texas at Dallas placed second, with the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas A&M following.



This was the teams first Southwest Collegiate Team Championship title.

Participating team members included Faik Aleskerov, international master-elect, of Azerbaijan; Denes Boros, grandmaster, of Hungary; Anatoly Bykhovsky, grandmaster, of Israel; Andre Diamant, grandmaster, of Brazil; Elshan Moradiabadi, grandmaster, of Iran; and Vitaly Neimer, grandmaster, of Israel.

Bykhovsky scored two wins and three draws to earn second place on tiebreaks for individual honor. Moradiabadi finished in third place on tiebreaks, Diamant in fourth and Boros in seventh. Overall, none of the grandmasters were defeated, helping the Knight Raiders earn first place.

Source: http://www.dailytoreador.com

Polgar, SPICE to leave Tech, cites lack of resources for move

Polgar, SPICE to leave Tech, cites lack of resources for move
Posted: Sunday, February 5, 2012 5:29 pm
By Summer Chandler
Contributing Writer

Susan Polgar and the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence will relocate from Texas Tech to Webster University in St. Louis, Mo., in June.

Polgar said eight students, all members of the “A” team of the 20-person Tech chess team have transferred or have committed to Webster University for the 2012-2013 academic year.

“One of the big elements and attractions was — obviously beyond the commitment of Webster to support chess and the chess program — is their global aspect,” Polgar, director of SPICE and head coach of the Knight Raiders chess team, said. “They are a global university. They already have numerous campuses worldwide, from Europe to Asia, and plan to expand that even further. And chess, being perhaps the most international game there is, I think it is a perfect match from that perspective. I think it’s a wonderful fit for SPICE.”

Polgar and her husband Paul Truong, coach and director of marketing and public relations for SPICE, said Webster University’s commitment to growing the SPICE program was one of the primary motivators for the move. Truong said he believes the chess program grew faster than officials with either SPICE or Tech anticipated, which led to insufficient resources to grow the program.

“We are, in a way, the enemy of our own success. I don’t think anybody — us or the administrators of the university — could ever expect how fast the program grew,” he said. “And, unfortunately, when you are a state institution, you know, the president, or let’s say the provost or the chancellor, cannot just make a decision that, ‘OK, tomorrow I am going to give you a million dollar budget for chess.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

However, Truong said he believes the unavailability of resources led to an unfortunate situation that limited the program’s ability to recruit players.

“From the previous president, to the provost, to the vice-provost, to the current administration, they are all very supportive,” he said. “The problem is, their hands are tied. When we have a list of so many students that out of all the universities in the world, they want to choose this location — we don’t have enough scholarships to offer everybody.

“And it’s one of those very unfortunate situations. If we like the status quo, if we are OK with, say, 20 players on the team or in the program, or let’s say having a few Grandmasters, it’s OK. But, we get to the point where we are the No. 1 program in America — and probably in the world — and everyone wants to come here. Something has to give.”

While Truong said Tech, as a state university, was limited in scholarships and methods to recruit world-renown chess players, Chris Cook, managing director of communications and marketing said Tech’s chess foundation is fully focused on recruiting excellent chess students.

“We have — and are still going to have a great chess program,” he said, “that will recruit students not just nationally but internationally as well. We’re focused on our future and toward expansion.”

Truong said he and Polgar do not want SPICE to simply cease to exist at Tech.

“We don’t want to leave things behind,” he said. “We don’t want it to collapse and just go away. So we made an offer to Tech that said we offer to keep the SPICE program here and Susan would come back, fly back two or three times a semester to continue training the team and help out the local community. We are still waiting for an answer, but we’re reaching out to the university.”

Cook said the chess program at Tech would not end with Polgar’s transition to another university.

“You have to commend Susan for all she has done for Texas Tech,” he said. “One of the reasons why our chess program is so strong is because of her involvement and we hope to build on that strength.”

Cook said the university will work to hire a new director, a new coach and a new outreach coordinator for the team.

While he did not know if Tech is going to keep the SPICE program in name, keeping a high-quality chess program is a goal for Tech.

“As to a high-quality chess program that is representative of what Susan established is definitely on the radar,” Cook said. “She does leave big shoes to fill, but what she has built here isn’t something we’re going to just let go away. First and foremost, we want the Tech name attached to it, and that’s what were going to do.”

On average, Truong said chess team members maintain between a 3.35 and 3.4 GPA and have a diverse range of backgrounds and majors.

“As a group, it’s a very high score, very high grades,” he said. “Our students are very diversified when it comes to majors, from math, to law, to engineering, to psychology, English, Spanish, finance, business. I mean, you name it, we have it.”

When asked why such a program — a national-champion team with a roster of academically achieving and diverse students — did not receive the resources Polgar and Truong thought necessary to grow SPICE, Cook said the university has to balance the needs of its many successful programs.

“We have a lot of successful programs and they all deserve more, they all do,” he said. “I can’t answer that question on chess accurately without knowing the exact figures. We have other national championships across the board: moot court, livestock judging, meat judging. There are a lot of them. We have a lot successful programs and I think they are all treated very fairly.”

Polgar said announcing the move now does not mean her job at Tech is finished.

“We’re still here and we’re still here until the end of May,” she said. “We still have big challenges ahead of us. Our team will compete in the Southwest Collegiate Championship in two weeks, and then of course we have another big event in Chicago for them gearing all of them up for the (College Chess) Final Four, where we hope to defend our title.

“So, we’re not done yet; we’re still here. Our heart is fully here with Texas Tech and with the students, and to bring more pride to Texas Tech.”

The Tech Division 1 chess team is the current reigning national collegiate chess championship team and will defend the title at the College Chess Final Four, March 31 through April 1 in Washington, D.C.

Source: http://www.dailytoreador.com

Fifth annual SPICE Cup hosts chess players from around world

Fifth annual SPICE Cup hosts chess players from around world
Daily Toreador
8:29 pm, Sun Oct 23, 2011
By Greg Lindeman
Staff Writer Daily Toreador - Dept. of Student Media, Texas Tech University

The fifth annual Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence Cup, a chess tournament, is taking place on Texas Tech’s campus from Oct. 15-25.

The SPICE Cup looks to promote chess and its educational, social and competitive benefits throughout the United States.

In this year’s tournament, the ‘A’ group is the highest rated international invitational in United States history and also includes three groups of grandmaster tournaments.

There are players from all over the world at the tournament, including the top national nine- and 10-year-olds, said Susan Polgar, a former Olympic champion, world champion and the director of the SPICE Cup.

“Six of the 26 in the top three are Texas Tech students,” Polgar said. “This tournament started in 2007 and became a tradition afterwards.”

The grand prize is $6,000 and second place will take home $3,000.

“Cooperation with the Susan Polgar Foundation, a non-profit organization, and Texas Tech arrange to bring visibility and information about chess,” Polgar said. “The games of the top three groups are being shown live, with an expected 30 million views worldwide.”

The tournament saw some of the top players from France, Germany, Cuba and Vietnam competing at a high level.

This tournament gave players chances to refine their skills as they played the best international players, Polgar said.

Ananya Roy, former vice president of the Knight Raiders and a junior political science major from Atlanta, Ga., said she practiced before the event by doing puzzles and playing online.

“My dad and brother used to play and I picked it up,” Roy said. “I played in clubs, and my coach saw potential. Ever since then, I began playing competitively.”

The tournament is in the rank order style where players are paired with people who are at a similar level. When they lose, they become paired with another person who lost. There is no elimination in the traditional sense and the winner will be the chess player with the highest rank at the end of the tournament.

To become a grandmaster, players need to acquire three or more “norms,” which are chess achievements based on performance, tournament ratings and winning a certain number of games against a grandmaster, said Josh Osbourn, a senior English major from Kentucky.

“I practiced with puzzles and I review the opening moves,” Osbourn said. “There are theories for opening moves that can give you an edge. They may not win you the game, but they give you a chance to put yourself in a better position by knowing how to start the game.”

Osbourn’s father showed him how to play when he was five years old, but he did not start playing competitively until high school. He has since gone on to national tournaments and now the SPICE Cup.

“I played one game today so far,” Osbourn said. “I feel that I did well. I play two more games tomorrow since I took a bye yesterday.”

The ‘A’ group will continue to play until 6 p.m. Tuesday when the closing ceremony for the group will officially end the two-week event.

Source: http://www.dailytoreador.com

Technology changes game of chess

Posted: Wednesday, February 9, 2011 9:04 pm

Technology changes game of chess
Rocio Rodriguez
Staff Writer Daily Toreador - Dept. of Student Media, Texas Tech University

Feb. 10 marks the 15th anniversary of the first time a computer defeated a human in the game of chess.

Though it may seem the average chess player could play and beat a home computer chess game, one particular game revolutionized the interaction of chess and technology — when Russian Garry Kasparov, who is considered by many the world’s best chess player, lost to his computer opponent, Deep Blue.

“Initially, (computer chess) was an entertainment, and then it became a competition pretty much from the mid-1980s to the mid-’90s,” said Susan Polgar, the first woman to earn the grandmaster title and director of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence at Texas Tech.

“For that decade it was a competition, and then when that famous match happened between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov, that the computer won — the IBM computer won — that pretty much put an end to the competition, because once he lost, and a number of other grandmasters lost as well to different programs, humans pretty much gave in.”

According to the American Physical Society website, in the first match between Kasparov and Deep Blue, the computer won the first game, shocking Kasparov. Kasparov however, won three games total and played two to a draw. They played again in 1997, but Deep Blue had been improved, working on a faster processor and other resources allowing it to adapt to new strategies. This rematch ended in a win for the machine.

Paul Truong, SPICE director of marketing and public relations and assistant coach of Tech’s chess team, the Knight Raiders, said after Deep Blue’s success, players realized they needed to learn from computers, not battle against them.

“(The computers the team practices against) are loaded with computer softwares,” Truong said. “We can’t even do anything without it. Things we don’t see, computers can see. Things we can’t calculate fast enough, computers can do in a millisecond. It’s becoming a part of what we do in chess. It’s not a challenge anymore because you can’t compete against a computer. There’s no chance.”

According to the IBM website, Deep Blue’s software is used to solving problems outside of the world of chess.

“The underlying RS/6000 technology is being used to tackle complex ‘real-world’ problems like cleaning up toxic waste sites, forecasting the weather, modeling financial data, designing cars, developing innovative drug therapies,” the IBM website states.

The senior faculty adviser and founder of Knight Raiders, associate professor of geosciences Hal Karlsson, said software is becoming an assistant of sorts to professionals.

“Today, what a lot of the so-called professional higher-level chess players do, they use the program to calculate variations,” Karlsson said. “So, if they’re interested in some particular variation, they feed it into a computer, and it comes up with things we don’t think of.”

Truong also said competitors’ success is determined by how they use the computers to train.

“(The top four chess schools) will be using (software) to prepare to compete against each other,” Truong said. “Those who can interpret the data better, who can use it better, that’s the one that’s going to win. That’s the different skills now.”

Source: http://www.dailytoreador.com/

It's impressive

International chess tourney draws highly ranked players

Posted: Monday, November 1, 2010 10:49 pm

Hallie Davis
Staff Writer

Daily Toreador

This Saturday Jones AT&T Stadium could hold up to 60,454 fans. While most of Lubbock will await the results of what happens on the field, between 30 million and 40 million people will be awaiting the results of what is going on in the Student Union Building.

The Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence is hosting its fourth annual SPICE Cup, a chess tournament that draws the biggest names in chess worldwide and will be going on all this week.

Brett James, a sophomore geosciences major from Richmond, Va., broadcasts the games online to FIDE, the World Chess Federation, which Paul Truong, the SPICE director of marketing and public relations, said is only second to FIFA, soccer’s governing body, in number of countries involved.

“It’s a matter of awareness,” said Susan Polgar, founder of the tournament and four-time world champion, of being known worldwide but receiving almost no recognition on campus. “I’m quite positive it’s only a matter of time before everybody in town knows about us.”

Polgar began the tournament and the institute in 2007 and has been able to build it up to its current state — the ‘A’ group of the tournament is the highest-rated international chess tournament in U.S. history — in just three years.

“She used her charm, and her fame managed to get people here,” said Hal Karlsson, one of the founders of SPICE. “They figure if a world champion is putting this on, she knows what she’s doing.”

When foreign players first heard about it, Karlsson said, he was forced to nearly beg them to come. This year, chess champions from around the world are already asking if they can be invited for next year’s tournament.

However, not everything happens outside of the U.S., or even Texas. Some of Tech’s success is very close to home.

“Look at our football game against UT-Austin every year,” Truong said. “When we beat them, it’s big news, but (the chess team) crushed them four to zero and no one really heard about it. We got revenge for our football team.”

As Tech becomes a bigger name in the chess world due to SPICE, the Knight Raiders are becoming stronger as well.

“I’ve had students from Princeton and other schools come up to me and say ‘Oh my gosh, it’s Texas Tech, look out,’” said tournament director and sophomore Spanish major Zach Haskin. “When it’s something intelligence related, Texas Tech is not predicted to be higher than Princeton, Yale, Stanford.”

But it is; Haskin, from Wichita Falls, said the team beat all three of the schools he mentioned by a wide margin.

Truong said SPICE is helping to make it clear that Tech is not a “jock” school. With the chess team’s GPA averaging at 3.28, he sees the tournament as just another way to recruit quality students to the university.

“The kind of students we attract, these are the kind of students any university would love to have,” Truong said.

The SPICE Cup is in its fifth of ten rounds, with players from around the world here to compete. Many will be staying for the next weekend as a part of SPICE’s first FIDE-rated open, which will feature a top team from Norway.

Competing now are 16 players from everywhere from Germany to Brazil.

Ray Robson, who has had two games end in a draw this tournament, may not be from anywhere terribly exotic, but he does hold the title of Grandmaster and was the youngest in U.S. history to earn the title when he did it at 14, Karlsson said.

“There aren’t so many really strong events in the U.S.,” Robson said, “so it’s great for people in the U.S. to play in such a great event.”

Robson, from Clearwater, Fla., attested to the quality of the tournament, saying it is probably the strongest tournament he’s been in.

Polgar said spectators are welcome to watch the games in the Matador Room in the SUB; they will start every day at 2 p.m. until Nov. 7. The only rule is that anyone who watches must be very quiet.

“The difference is we don’t have 60,000 people screaming in the stands,” Truong said. “So it kind of gets lost somewhere; people don’t realize how big this is. If you talk pure numbers, it’s impressive.”

Source: http://www.dailytoreador.com

Polgar appears on international radio show

Polgar appears on international radio show
By Jon Arnold
Managing Editor
Published: Friday, August 27, 2010
Updated: Friday, August 27, 2010 02:08

Susan Polgar, the executive director of Texas Tech’s Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, was featured as an expert Thursday on the BBC’s international debate program “World Have Your Say.”

Thursday’s discussion centered on the book “Bounce” by British author Matthew Syed, who also was on the program. The book argues that too much importance is placed on natural ability when it comes to determining who will end up being successful. Polgar’s story is mentioned in the book to back up this claim.

“My father had written a book even before I was born exactly on the same topic,” Polgar said. “He was a firm believer that success is ninety-nine percent sweat and one percent talent.”

Polgar’s father’s work came to fruition in the form of Susan and her sisters. Her father trained the girls in chess from a very young age, and Susan became the first female Grandmaster to earn the title in regular play. One of her sisters became the second female to accomplish the feat. She has another sister who is an International Master.

Ros Atkins, the presenter of the show, said this made Polgar the ideal guest to discuss the topic at hand.

“Well, she’s the real deal, isn’t she?” Atkins said when reached at the show’s London studio via phone. “She’s the living proof of the theory which Matthew Syed espouses. So if you believe in what he says, Susan Polgar and her sisters, there is no better example.”

Atkins went on to say that Polgar’s presence brought the discussion from theory to real life.

“You can talk about things hypothetically, but if you want to bring a discussion alive, clearly people who have lived something rather than just believing it brings something special to any conversation.

“There’s an authority which comes from someone who has reached the top, which the rest of us who haven’t reached the top just can’t have,” he said.

In addition to Syed and Polgar, former NBA player John Amaechi joined the discussion, as well as callers from around the world.

Polgar said the experience of listening to and debating with such well-accomplished people was fascinating. She said the worldwide exposure her experience provided for Tech and SPICE will help increase awareness about Tech’s academic profile.

“It’s bringing visibility and credibility to this fine university that is well known for its athletic department and I think should be more known for its academic field that we’re so good at,” she said. “I’m hoping that through my celebrity status, at least in the world of chess, I can contribute something to the university that others can’t.”

Atkins said “World Have Your Say” contacted Polgar after he found out Syed would be coming on the program. Since Polgar’s story stuck out to Atkins after reading “Bounce” he did some research and e-mailed Polgar.

Polgar joined the program from the studios of KOHM-FM in Lubbock, and Atkins had high praise for the station employees, as he set up Polgar’s appearance at the last minute.

“The guys at KOHM were unbelievably helpful on very short notice,” he said. “One of the most accommodating sound engineers we’ve ever dealt with in the States. They really were a pleasure.”

The program is available in a podcast form on the show’s website and www.worldhaveyoursay.com. It airs every weekday at noon on KTXT-FM 88.1.

Source: http://www.dailytoreador.com

http://www.chessdom.com/news-2010/polgar-live-bbc