Elliott Liu has played chess for 14 years, but never before as part of a team. The king’s game, after all, is a battle of individual egos. But that changed when Liu recruited three fellow undergrads to represent Stanford in the Pan American Intercollegiate Championships in Dallas last December. Freshmen Liu and Vaishnav Aradhyula and sophomores Christopher De Sa and Daniel Schwarz have faced off against one other in national competitions for years. Aradhyula and Liu met for the first time in the third grade when they competed in the 1998 All-American Cup, which Liu won. “We thought it was a no-brainer since all of us were here,” he says. “Why not give it a shot?” The team of former rivals tied for third place in Dallas, earning them a trophy and a trip back to Texas in April to compete in the President’s Cup—the chess equivalent of the Final Four. The Stanford team will face tough competition from the University of Texas-Dallas and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which placed first and second, respectively, in the Pan American tournament, and the University of Texas-Brownsville.
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