José Guilherme Santos is a Computer Science and Engineering student at Técnico – Taguspark campus. On September 10, he won the Absolute National Chess Championship, without a defeat and with eight points out of nine (seven wins and two draws).

In 2020, the student managed to win his first national championship, at the time in the under-18 category. He shares that this achievement gave him “an important confidence boost, from which came more important achievements”, such as this most recent title. He is also a Master of the International Chess Federation.

As for the strategy to balance chess and his studies, José admits that he had to face some obstacles. To ensure that he doesn’t neglect his academic work, he says he has to concentrate all his competitive practice in the summer. However, he also thinks that the two fields help each other – “I think that logical thinking and reasoning skills are common in school and chess”. He adds “as engineers, we tend to think logically, which is also a key part of chess”.

Another thing he finds interesting is the fact that there are different possibilities for approaching the same problem – “both on the chess board and in my studies there are various ways of solving a problem and that’s where creativity comes in. So, I think that chess works on aspects that are relevant to my studies, and vice versa.”