News Contact: Steve McGregor, UT Dallas, (214) 215-8789, [email protected]

UT Dallas Wins 2007 Final Four of Chess

Retains Title of Best Collegiate Chess Team in America

RICHARDSON, Texas (March 25, 2007) – In an awesome display of power and mastery, chess players from The University of Texas at Dallas thoroughly dominated their opponents to win the 2007 Final Four of Chess tournament, held this weekend in Fort Worth, Texas.

With the victory, UT Dallas won the President’s Cup trophy, emblematic of the Final Four champion, as well as the right to continue calling itself the best collegiate chess team in the land, a title the university reclaimed last December by winning the 2006 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, the most prestigious college chess competition held each year in the Western Hemisphere.

UT Dallas finished the round-robin Final Four without a loss and beat the closest competitor, archrival University of Maryland, Baltimore County, by a margin of five and one-half points (10.5 versus 5)– a huge gap in chess competition and the widest margin ever in the seven-year history of the Final Four. In the three rounds held over two days, UT Dallas compiled an overwhelming record of nine wins and three draws.

The other two competitors, Miami Dade College (4.5 points) and Duke University (4 points), finished third and fourth, respectively.

"Our players and coach turned in an incredible performance," said Jim Stallings, director of the UT Dallas chess program. "When last December’s Pan Am is included, UT Dallas players have not lost a single time in 60 games – in the two biggest college chess tournaments of the season. That’s mind-boggling!"

Stallings credited Coach Rade Milovanovic’s closed-door practices the week before the tournament and his adding two alternates to the usual four team members with keeping the opponents guessing about UT Dallas’ strategy and its lineups.

The UT Dallas team was represented at the Final Four by two grandmasters on boards one and two — arts and technology major and sophomore Alejandro Ramirez and computer science graduate student Magesh Chandran Panchanathan. On boards three and four were international masters Marko Zivanic, a junior computer science major, and Drasko Boskovic, a junior business administration major. Alternates were international masters Dmitri Shneider, a senior finance major, and Davorin Kuljasevic, a sophomore business administration major.

This year’s MVP Award went to Boskovic, who scored more points than any other competitor with a perfect 3-0 record.

This year’s Final Four was held at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport Marriott South Hotel in Fort Worth.

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