On college chess

The Pan-American Intercollegiate Chess Championship wrapped up on December 30, 2010 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As I mentioned previously, the University of Texas--Dallas took clear first place with a 6-0 match score. Alex Betaneli, the chief tournament director and organizer, wrote an excellent recap for the U.S. Chess Federation website in which he not only recounted all the action but offered some thoughts on the current state of college chess in the United States. Betaneli pointed out the well-known and much-lamented disconnect between the enormously popular scholastic chess scene and the stingy ranks of adult, professional chess players; he suggested that shortcomings at the college level contribute greatly to the steep drop-off of chess playing as juniors leave adolescence.

Betaneli's case in point is the Pan-Am tournaments from the 1970s and 1980s. Literally hundreds of schools would show up to play, and many of the young competitors went on to become the face of American chess. By contrast, the 2010 edition of the tournament only saw seventeen different American schools send teams (Canada and the West Indies sent a total of three teams and some U.S. schools also entered more than one team). A number of possible explanations were highlighted by Betaneli and other USCF members on the message board. These included school funding, location/timing of the tournament and the advent of chess scholarships, to name a few.

I have a small amount of experience with college chess, having captained the Dartmouth College team at three Pan-Am tournaments (2006-2008). We won the U1600 prize in 2006 and missed the U2000 prize by half a point in 2007; 2008 was less successful. In any event, having gone from nationally-ranked junior to active college player to as-active-as-I-can-be adult, I have a few thoughts on the matter as well.

First off, I find the location/timing argument less persuasive, especially the location element. The Pan-Ams have been held December 27-30 for as long as I can remember (which admittedly isn't that long), and I have traveled to frigid D.C., balmy Miami and arid Dallas to play. I certainly enjoyed Miami the most as far as location is concerned, but then again, who wouldn't? And I wasn't going there on vacation, I was going to represent my school and play chess. I would have played on the moon if they'd held the event there. Timing is another matter, but you're never going to please everyone. Some schools have finals in December, others in January. Some schools are on break in January, others are back in session. The only common denominator is that everybody will be on break between Christmas and New Year's. So I think the organizers have chosen the optimum timing for the tournament.

As far as school funding is concerned, this is a much more formidable obstacle. Dartmouth was generous enough to pay our hotel and entry fee costs every year, and depending on the year there was also some money for meals, transportation and even USCF membership renewal. All we had to do was ask (Aravind Reddy '09 and Daniel Leung '09 did terrific jobs preparing our funding proposals). I certainly recognize that not every school is as generous as Dartmouth--either by nature or by dint of tough times--and there is no question that participating in Pan-Ams is an expensive proposition. Once all is said and done, you're looking at an outlay of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, especially depending on where the tournament is located and where your players are coming from. This is not small potatoes, and I have no doubt that it was budgetary constraints and not lack of interested players that kept a number of teams at home.

The question of scholarships is different and more complex. As college chess has turned into more of a "semi-professional" sport, teams comprised strictly of amateurs stand less and less of a chance of doing well at Pan-Ams. I am not against chess scholarships--on the contrary, I think they are a great thing--but I do think they have had the paradoxical effect of temporarily setting back college chess. Temporarily is the key word here. What has happened over the past decade or so is that certain schools, the University of Texas--Dallas and University of Maryland--Baltimore County chief among them, have made their chess team a priority. They have swelled their ranks with top-caliber players, both by offering full scholarships to the winners of prestigious junior tournaments (a brilliant strategy, in my view) and by recruiting adult professionals. There is nothing at all illegal about this--the scholarship players work hard at their studies, be they graduate students or undergrad--but it has served to "de-amateurize" college chess, especially where the recruitment of professional players as grad students is concerned.

The result is that UTD and UMBC dominated college chess for years until other schools decided they wanted in on the action. Texas Tech University and the University of Texas--Brownsville have both begun scholarship programs in recent years, and they too have enjoyed great chess success. While this was going on, schools like Duke, Harvard and Yale, which had traditionally scored well in team competitions because of the talented amateurs on their roster, began to fade into irrelevance.

This brings us more or less to the present day. There are a handful of "second-tier" chess schools, such as New York University and Stanford, that are still competitive, but they never actually win any tournaments because they simply lack the depth of a UTD or a UMBC. As one commenter noted on the discussion forum attached to Betaneli's article, "There are fewer teams competing for the top prize but the road to that prize is getting tougher." Indeed it is, and the perception that victory is unattainable is powerful dissuasion when it comes time to convince your star player to give up his Christmas break or plead with your school's student government for a few extra dollars to make the trip possible. So where to go from here?

I think the institution of the class prize is the key to redeeming college chess, at least as concerns the Pan-Am tournament. Class prizes, which recognize the top-scoring teams in lower rating brackets, give even the most modestly-composed of squads a chance to succeed. Recently there has been one class prize per rating category; I propose future editions of this tournament expand that to two or more prizes per class. This would erase the sense of futility that plagues many middle-of-the-pack teams and reenergize the competition at all levels. Furthermore, this would accelerate the reversal of the "setback" I mentioned earlier, which has manifested itself in this perception of fruitlessness and is only now beginning to fade. So up with class prizes and up with college chess!