Stuyvesant’s chess team placed first at this year’s National High School Championship at the Supernationals Tournament, defeating Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology of Alexandria, Virginia by 1.5 points, for a final score of 22 to 20.5 out of a possible 28. Hunter College High School came in third with 19 points.

The 2009 Supernationals, the most important scholastic chess event of the year, was held in Nashville, Tennessee, from Friday, April 3 to Saturday, April 5. At least 45 states were represented at the tournament, forming a pool of over 5000 players hailing from 1515 schools from around the country. The Stuyvesant team won the High School Championship section, besting nearly 400 other players to officially become the best high school team in the nation.

The Stuyvesant team consisted of senior Arthur Wei, juniors Robert Hess, Andrew Ryba and team captain Zachary Weiner, sophomore Eigen Wang and freshmen Nicholas Ryba, Loren Weiss and Zachary Young.

“I felt somewhat nervous before the tournament started because I did not touch chess for a month before the tournament,” Wang said in an e-mail interview.  “I was proud to play for my school, especially because we won. I was also proud of my teammates for playing well and winning the tournament together.”

According to team coordinator and history teacher William Boericke, the team had two main strengths. First, Hess, an International Master, was the highest rated player at the tournament, becoming the National High School champion with a perfect 7-0 score.

“Hess made it look easy while the rest of us just stared in awe,” Young said in an e-mail interview.

Second, the team had many players who were capable of earning very high scores. The tournament was structured such that only the top four scores on any team would count in the final decision.  Andrew Ryba, Nicholas Ryba, Wang and Wei each scored five out of seven points.  Thus, Stuyvesant’s final score was the sum of Hess’s seven points and three fives, individual results which were higher than any other team in the tournament achieved. Weiss and Young finished with scores of 3.5 and 4.5, respectively. Weiner also finished with a 4.5.

The tournament has been held annually since 1969.  Stuyvesant has competed at the tournament every year since its inception, frequently taking first place in the tournament’s early years.

ecently, however, Stuyvesant has faced increasingly tough competition.  The last time Stuyvesant placed first was in 1999.  Stuyvesant came in fifth place in 2008 and seventh in 2007.

Teams like Thomas Jefferson had approximately 30 players, months of preparation and great funding, and were a stiff challenge for the eight-person Stuyvesant team.

“We knew from the beginning that Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia was the team to beat,” Young said in the same e-mail.  “TJ is our primary rival in math, and so that made the competition more dramatic. We were watching them for the whole tournament, and they were playing well. But we thought that we would have a slight edge because our team has more depth: we had more players that were competing for top scores, so we had more room for error.”

“All of the players on the team were very motivated, and played a lot of great games and fought very hard to win,” Andrew Ryba said in an e-mail interview.

“I was obviously extremely proud of the team and their outstanding performance individually, but what really touched me the most was the unity that we all felt in trying to accomplish our goal,” Weiner said in an e-mail interview.  “In chess it is easy to become enamored with individual success, but every single person on this team had an extreme appreciation for what we were trying to accomplish as a group.”

“With only Arthur Wei graduating this year, Stuyvesant should have a very tough team for a couple of years,” Boericke said in an e-mail interview.