Susan Polgar and the Knight Raiders
The TTU SPICE Knight Raiders, led by Susan Polgar, have captured their second consecutive Final Four title. The team won the cup in a nail biter, finishing just 0,5 points ahead of UTD and UMBC.
Final four standings
1. TTU – SPICE 8.0
2-3. UTD and UMBC 7.5
4. NYU 1.0
The winning team consisted of grandmasters Georg Meier, a freshman finance major from Germany and winner of the European Team Chess Championship; Elshan Moradiabadi, a business graduate student from Iran; Anatoly Bykhovsky, a sophomore finance major from Israel; Andre Diamant, a sophomore economics major from Brazil; Grandmaster Denes Boros, a sophomore psychology major from Hungary; and International Master Vitaly Neimer, a freshman finance major from Israel.
With this victory Susan Polgar, Knight Raiders head coach and director of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, is the first woman in history to lead a men’s Division I team to two straight national championships. “It was total teamwork. Nothing was decided until the final second,” Polgar said in the Tech release. “We are very proud and happy to bring another Final Four Championship to Texas Tech.”
The victory comes just a month before the SPICE center along with highly recruited Grand Master-level players move to Webster University in St. Louis.
More about this year’s Knight Raiders success at Susan Polgar’s website / The first year success of Knight Raiers in 2011
