We will crush all of you!!

May 23, 2003 9:36 PM

College Chess Team Recruiting Scandal! Stacking the deck with grandmasters allegedly earning degrees. Ludicrous/pathetic consequences.
posted by crunchburger (8 comments total)

Colleges let all kinds of athletes attend their schools and receive only the pretext of an education. When it's football and basketball we ignore it because college sports are necessary for the bottom line.

This at least is being done not to sell tickets to a football game, but to attract brainier students to the college.

It's only silly if you assume chess is inherently less important than football or basketball, which I'd say it's not. No doubt about it, you shouldn't bring in ringers to win at your sport, but frankly this is only news because someone thinks the idea of giving athletic scholarships to chess nerds is funny.
posted by Hildago at 9:48 PM on May 23, 2003

Damn, pretense of an education. Also, I didn't mean to sound so bitter.
posted by Hildago at 9:48 PM on May 23, 2003

ah, these sordid times.... When will we stand up to these god-denouncing heathen chess players who want nothing more than our money and our 15-year-old daughters?
posted by kaibutsu at 9:55 PM on May 23, 2003

In highschool, there was a kid named Shiv on our chess team, who was one of the best players in the state. The rest of the team was essentially baggage. I had fun on the second board, but we were all pretty resigned to Shiv being the alpha and omega of the high school chess team. He eventually started doing the teaching of the game, as well, which was ok, though he was kinda hard on us.

One day, he came in frustrated and declared, "Today, we play only speed chess. Even if I give you time to think, you still make mistakes, so we will play fast."

He left after that year on a chess scholarship to Texas. We all rejoiced a little, I tihnk, but then found out that the sponsor for the chess team was retiring, and that there was never againto be chess at Oakville.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:00 PM on May 23, 2003

Chess is good, but it can become an obsession to a degree which is hard to understand. I'm a rated player myself, and I got a lot out of it. But some of the chess people I met were pretty scary. The strongest, a guy I let sleep on my couch for a year, was a very strong master. I have never met such an intense and competitive person. Dealing with this guy really made me reconsider my goals of getting "really good" at chess. Is it worth it? These guys die a thousand deaths every time they lose a board game.
posted by crunchburger at 10:07 PM on May 23, 2003

Scott McCloud on "The Most Violent Game."
posted by kaibutsu at 10:23 PM on May 23, 2003

Scool as commercial instutions are merely micro of our larger society. My son took up the oboe in middle school and was told by more than a few parents that the oboe would get him a scolarship because school bands overloaded with sax and trumpet players. Ah, life. He switched to sax and now to guitar. Now he will have to get good grade etc --or a job soon--or become an early entry into unemployment lines, growing rapidly.
posted by Postroad at 3:38 AM on May 24, 2003

I suspect the outrage is centered less on the use of scholarship monies to recruit talented chess players, and more on the fact that the recruited chess players are well beyond collegiate age, having returned to academics after time in the "professional" chess world. It's the difference between, say, scouring high schools for up-and-coming soccer players, and scouring FIFA games for established players who don't have an American undergraduate degree and might therefore attend college a second time.
posted by thomascrown at 8:54 AM on May 24, 2003