One Ivy. One Team. One World Whose Future Hangs in the Balance.

Columbia University’s Chess Club came out yesterday and spanked had a pretty darn good showing against Brown, Dartmouth, Yale, and Penn in the fourth annual Inter Ivy Championship. The tournament, held all day yesterday in Earl Hall (that home court advantage doe) resulted in a tie between Columbia’s A and B teams. In the tiebreaker, team A won, securing the victory for Columbia. To add to the delightful shellacking, this is the third time (out of four tournaments!) that this team has taken it home for our beloved Alma.

This is, in fact, not surprising because obviously Columbia wins at smartness our team is home to some of the best chess players in the U.S. of A.  Matthew Michaelides, President of the club as well as a ranked National Master says of his team, “Victor Shen (who competed in the tournament) is an International Master, but the team also includes International Master Eli Vovsha who is a PhD student in Computer Science and International Master Rusudan Goletiani, a student in GS and who has competed in the invitational and highly-prestigious US Women’s Chess Championship many times. There are about 10 Columbia students who are ranked a National Master or above by the US Chess Federation.”

Fancy.

Team Roster:

A-Team: Victor Shen CC’15, Kyron Griffith CC’17, Andrew Ryba SEAS ’14, Eigen Wang CC’15, Shaoxiang Wang CC’14,

B-Team: Alexander Fabbri CC’17, Abigail Marshall BC ’14, Jonathan Pagan SEAS ’17, Srikar Varadaraj CC ’17

More drama than an Ingmar Bergman  film via Shutterstock