SHE MOVE ONE SPACE ANY DIRECTION SHE DAMN CHOOSE: Fresh off their second straight national championship win, Texas Tech chess coach Susan Polgar is taking herself and her whole team to tiny Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, according to her "the center of chess in America."
Homeschooled in her native Budapest, Polgar was the world's best female chess player by the age of 15. In 2005, she set a Guinness World Record by playing 326 simultaneous games -- and winning 309 of those matches, with 14 draws and just three losses. She is the executive director and founder of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, known as SPICE.
The Webster program will be based on campus, but its top players will clearly spend plenty of time at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis, a 6,000-square-foot shrine to the game...
ReplyDeleteShall we open with "One town's very like another," or is "No ordinary venue" the stronger move?
Buddy, hold this at a1. What is it?
ReplyDelete18 inches.
18 inches. Strap, put Ollie on the other side. Measure this from h8. Buddy, how far?
18 inches.
18 inches. I think you'll find this is the exact same measurements as our chessboards back in Lubbock. Okay, let's get dressed for practice.
Tech! [echoes]
[whispers] It is big.
Webster is "tiny"? It's got a heck of a theatre program. But I suppose many things are small in comparison to Texas Tech...
ReplyDeleteOf course, Tech is only the fifth biggest college in Texas, behind UT-Austin, A&M, UNT, and University of Houston.
ReplyDeleteI now realize that David Simon would disapprove of this post title as being insufficiently respectful of the true purpose of what he intended with season one of The Wire, and I diminish his work by excerpting it so glibly.<span> </span>
ReplyDeleteAnyone else see the name of the chess program and start shoehorning in the <span>First Annual </span>Montgomery Burns Award<span> for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of </span>Excellence<span>?</span>
ReplyDeleteBuddy, hold this at a1. What is it?
ReplyDeleteLooks like about 22 inches and, I don't know, it's not exactly at the little hash mark, like maybe 22 and three-eights? 22 and seven-sixteenths? About?
18 inches. Strap, put Ollie on the other side. Measure this from h8. Buddy, how far?
It's -- no, thanks, Ollie, I can reach myself -- it's also about 22 and seven-sixteenths. Wait, it wasn't square. I'm going to go with 22 and three-eights. It's actually right in between, so if I eyeball it, it's really like 22 and fifteen-thirty-seconds, about. There's kind of a parallax thing and if I get too close it kind of goes blurry. Is it all right if I round off?
18 inches. I think you'll find this is the exact same measurements as our chessboards back in Lubbock. Okay, let's get dressed for practice.
It's not 18 inches -- wait, it's ... maybe you mean it's the same number of squares, because that seems more relevant to me. Like, same number of dark and light squares, same number of bishops and rooks -- coach? Coach? Why do I have to change my clothes for practice?