New York Times on SPICE Chess Move to Webster

New York Times on SPICE Chess Move to Webster
Feb 15, 2012

Webster University recently announced that champion chess Grandmaster Susan Polgar and her Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE) are relocating to Webster University along with a champion chess team.

The St. Louis Beacon called it “a major coup” for Webster, and now The New York Times has covered the move.

The Times talked with Webster Provost and senior vice president Julian Schuster, who helped recruit and hire Polgar:

Mentioning that Webster has campuses in more than 100 places around the world, Mr. Schuster, who grew up in the former Yugoslavia, where chess is popular, said: “I did not grow up in this country. I do not play football. I do not have this connection from the old country. Chess is a global game, and we live in global times. And Webster is a global university.”

The coverage on the National page of the Times also drew the notice of Deb Peterson in her gossip column at stltoday.com, the website for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

A two-year-old scoring system may be the solution

Under a New Scoring System, Fewer Ties and Drawn Games
By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN
Published: November 13, 2010

A two-year-old scoring system may be the solution to two problems that have long bedeviled chess.

One is how to break ties at the end of tournaments. Complicated rules based on opponents’ scores have been used, as have tie-breaker games of varying lengths, but both have drawbacks.

The second problem involves games that quickly end in draws because the players do not want to battle it out or can earn more prize money by drawing a game. (In some tournaments, a draw at the end guarantees each player a share of the pot.)

One cure for prearranged or short draws was first used in Sofia, Bulgaria, a few years ago. It is a rule that prohibits players from offering a draw or from drawing before 30 moves have been played. But a way around it is to repeat a position three times, which under chess regulations is a draw.

Two years ago, the organizers of the first Bilbao Final Masters event tried another approach. Under their scoring system, wins, which had been worth 1 point, count for 3, and draws, which had been half a point, count for 1. The Bilbao system rewards wins and discourages draws.

The fourth Spice Cup, which ended last weekend at Texas Tech University, illustrated the benefits of the system.

In the tournament’s B division, which used the traditional scoring system, Anatoly Bykhovsky, an Israeli grandmaster, and Gergely Antal, an international master from Hungary, tied for first with 6 points each. Bykhovsky had three wins and six draws; Antal had four wins, a loss and four draws.

The A division used the Bilbao system and came up with a winner: Alexander Onischuk of the United States, who edged out Georg Meier of Germany, 18 to 17. Onischuk had five wins, two losses and three draws; Meier had four wins, one loss and five draws. Under the traditional scoring system, they would have tied with 6.5 points each.

Onischuk’s aggressive approach was rewarded in the last round, when he beat Ray Robson, a 16-year-old grandmaster from Florida.

More here.

SPICE in the news

Lubbock Avalanche Journal - www.lubbockonline.com (May 27)

Back to front page

New York Times

May 25, 2007, 6:04 pm
An Opening Gambit With an Odd Acronym
By Dylan McClain

When the legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight was pushed out of Indiana University, Texas Tech University in Lubbock jumped to welcome him, in hopes of raising the school’s national profile. Perhaps that move did not reap enough public attention (or maybe it was not the right kind), because the school is now trying another visibility-building leap in a different kind of competitive endeavor: Chess.

Texas Tech announced with some fanfare on May 12, the day of its graduation exericises, that it had hired this year’s commencement speaker — Susan Polgar, the former women’s world champion — to head something called the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, or (wait for it) Spice....

Jim Brink, Texas Tech’s senior vice provost for academic affairs, said that Spice will receive more than $250,000 a year from a combination of private donations and university financing. What will the institute do? “All sorts of things,” he said.

Among them: Help recruit and train a “world-class” chess team; organize and promote tournaments; do community outreach in local schools to promote chess; and work with departments around the university on the use of chess as a research tool, particularly in the development of artificial intelligence.

...Mr. Brink said that the university hoped to attract better students through chess. “There is a strict correlation between excellence in chess and excellence in the classroom,” Mr. Brink said.

Source: NY Times