Checkmate: White Queen defeats Black King

The third time proved to be a charm for Dame Blanche. After having been defeated online two years in a row, this time the EPFL chess clubprevailed against its Zurich rival, even if the contest came down to a tie-break. On 5 November, eight players from each club competed against one another in person in Zurich, while 68 additional players competed online – and that’s what made the difference for EPFL.

Grégoire Tissier, president of Dame Blanche since last year, is delighted with the club’s victory. “The ETH Zurich players had roughly 100 more Elo points than us,” he says. [Elo is a system for rating chess players’ skill level; the world chess champion has around 2,850 Elo points.] “We lost the face-to-face games 3.5 to 4.5, with the half-point resulting from a tie. But we won the online tournament, which gave us a point, and the rules state that the online result would be the deciding factor in the event of a tie.” More than the victory, however, it was the event itself – called Polychamps – that Tissier really appreciated. The two chess clubs finally got to compete in person after two years of pandemic restrictions. The event was held in the impressive Dozentenfoyer room overlooking central Zurich. Digital chess boards were set up so that the event could be broadcast live, and a grandmaster along with a student from each club provided the commentary. Overall, it was a big success.

“The ultimate game”

The next tournament will be held at EPFL in late 2023. Tissier and the other eight members of the Dame Blanche leadership committee are already preparing for it – even though Tissier himself, currently in the final year of his Master’s program, won’t be participating since he will already have graduated. Chess has been a significant part of his time at EPFL. “When I came here in 2018, I knew the rules of the game but didn’t play regularly,” he says. “I got into it after I saw a friend playing online.” Was it love at first knight? “Kind of,” he says. “At some point, I realized it wasn’t just a game, but the ultimate game.” Tissier joined Dame Blanche, an AGEPoly commission, first as a member and then became part of its leadership committee in 2019.

“The rules of chess are simple but the game is very difficult to master,” says Tissier. “Unless you study it, you reach a certain point and can’t progress any further.” What he enjoys about chess is also what he likes about math. “It’s a very logic-driven activity,” he says. “The route to victory is a bit like solving a math problem or proving a theorem: it’s about finding a winning move and visualizing all the steps needed to get there. There’s no subjectivity. You know a winning move exists, just like when you know a theorem is true – it’s up to you to find a way to prove it.”

Perhaps these parallels with math are why Dame Blanche attracts so many math students. Four of the nine leadership committee members are math majors. Physics and computer science are also similar subjects; you can find them along with a variety of other majors among the 300 or so followers of Dame Blanche’s Telegram account. Chess enthusiasts and anyone curious about the game meet twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to learn, improve, share tips and simply play. Dame Blanche also holds regular tournaments, waffle nights and competitions with other clubs.

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