UC chess team has all the right moves

The University of Cincinnati engineering student moved to Spain in January to begin his third co-op job. But it didn’t take long to find an outlet for his other passion.

Balyan led UC’s chess team to the national championship in their division at this year’s Pan-American Collegiate Tournament.

Balyan and three other students from UC’s chess club competed against 46 other college teams in the Charlotte, North Carolina, tournament, which features both an open division and a division for teams like UC’s with a combined average ranking under 1800.

The team lost one of its early rounds against the University of Washington but bounced back by winning three consecutive rounds before toppling Ohio State University for the championship trophy.

“It was a great event. I hope it can help bring chess culture back to UC,” said Balyan, the club president.

Balyan is working full time in the Basque Country this semester, getting real-world experience in neural networks while pursuing a computer science degree in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. Through co-op, students at UC divide their time between classroom instruction and full-time employment in their chosen field.

“I came to UC because of the co-op program. It seemed too good to be true. But it’s just fantastic,” he said.

Balyan was only in Spain a couple days before he found a local chess club and signed up to play in its weekly tournaments.

“There’s a good chess culture here,” he said.

Invented in India more than 1,200 years ago, chess is a two-player board game with 32 pieces arranged on a grid of 64 alternately colored squares. But the elegant simplicity of chess contains multitudes of outcomes — so many that they have never been described.

To appreciate its complexity, just ask team member Joseph Daiber, a math major in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

“If you took every atom in the universe and gave each its own subuniverse and counted all of those atoms, chess would still have a quintillion times more possible game outcomes,” Daiber said. “Yet it’s still technically a solvable game.”

Even today’s supercomputers can’t calculate all the possible game iterations, he said.

“It’s impossible. There aren’t enough electrons to store that much data on a memory chip,” he said.

“There’s definitely a strong correlation between chess and math,” Daiber said. “Being good at math has made me better at chess.”

Balyan follows the exploits of his favorite chess players the way Major League Baseball fans can recite batting averages. His favorite player is five-time world champion and Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand.

But he respects other players such as Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen, whose peak chess rating of 2882 is a record.

“The way Magnus plays is unreal. I’ve seen him create water from stone,” Balyan said. “He leaves a trail of disruption behind him.”

Balyan has rubbed elbows with some of the biggest names in chess. Playing in one tournament, he noticed that seated next to him was U.S. grandmaster Fabiano Caruana, the No. 2 player in the world. After making quick work of his opponent, Caruana turned in his seat to watch Balyan finish his game.

“Sadly, I blew it. I played to a draw in front of him with live commentary on the game,” he said.

Losing is part of the game but not a regular part of Balyan’s game. He has the UC team’s highest rating of 2180, putting him in elite company.