UMBC won the 2009 Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship yesterday with perfect score of 6.0 points. This year’s tournament was held in South Padre Island, Texas on December 27-30
This is from the UMBC press release:
“Capping a near-flawless performance over the past four days at the tournament in South Padre Island, Texas, the Retrievers topped a team from the University of Texas-Brownsville today to secure the title outright for the first time since 2005.
Today’s win completed a perfect 6-0 match record for the tournament, known as the “World Series of college chess.” UMBC’s dominant performance is all the more impressive given the high quality of the 28-team field this year, said Alan Sherman, director of the school’s chess program.
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Today UMBC topped UT-Brownsville’s “B” team, 4-0, to complete the march to the title. But the Retrievers most of the hard work yesterday, winning decisive matches over two of the strongest teams in college chess. The Retrievers topped UT-Dallas, 3 to 1, in the early match, and then got past UT-Brownsville’s “into today’s action. The tournament also included teams from Yale, Princeton, NYU, Stanford and University of Chicago.
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The Pan-Am is the most celebrated intercollegiate chess tournament in the Americas. Since its 1946 inception, dozens of universities throughout the Americas have participated. The tournament is open to any college or university team from North, South, or Central America.
Since 2003, the teams representing the top four schools in the Pan-Am have met again in the spring to compete for the President’s Cup in an event sponsored by the U.S. Chess Federation — the “Final Four of Chess”. In 2010 the University of Texas Brownsville will host the final four, UMBC, UTD, UTB and Texas Tech, in April.
You can get information on the tournament and the games at monroi.