One week after the University of Maryland Terrapins brought the national basketball championship home to College Park, another Maryland university will be contending for a national title in the Final Four.
However, where the Terps won with brawn, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Retrievers rely on brains.
This is, after all, the Final Four of chess.
"College chess is like Revenge of the Nerds for sports," said Alan T. Sherman, faculty adviser for the UMBC chess team and an associate professor of computer science. "It's a chance for smart, outstanding students to be sports heroes."
UMBC, which has the top-ranked college chess team in the country, faces off against a close rival, University of Texas at Dallas, today at the World Chess Hall of Fame and Sidney Samole Chess Museum in Miami. Harvard and Stanford universities are the other teams in the invitational tournament, which like the basketball Final Four is for the four best college teams in the country.
Even though Las Vegas hasn't come out with the point spread yet, neither big-name university is favored to win.
"We've won the Pan American competition five out of the last six years, so we're the team to beat," Sherman said.
With the bravado one might expect from a team that has two grandmasters to UMBC's one, Tim Redman, director of Texas' chess program and a professor of literary studies, disagreed. "I think we're slightly better," he said.
Unlike the basketball tournament, the chess Final Four won't be carried on network television. Chess enthusiasts will have to make do by following the match on the Internet.
And instead of being played in a cavernous auditorium filled with 53,000 crazed, face-painted fans, the chess tournament will take place in a tranquil museum wing where the expected 300 spectators are forced to keep silent so as not to hurt the players' concentration.
The spoils that go to the winners are less significant, too. Instead of a gigantic crystal trophy and the potential for lucrative professional contracts earned by players on the nation's best college basketball team, players on the nation's best chess team get a small silverplate loving cup and bragging rights.
"It's all honor," said Redman, whose team beat UMBC by half a point to win the chess Final Four last year, the tournament's first year.
Unlike with top-ranked college basketball players, there is little pressure for college chess players to turn professional before graduation.
