"Yale stunned us," Yin said. "We were a little shaken up. It was a wake-up call."
By the middle of the second round, the games were still close.
"In such a short game, with five or three minutes left you can easily blunder," said Riordan, the club president.
But Harvard closed up the second round with a decisive victory, winning three games to one with a single draw.
Last year Harvard entered the national collegiate pennant and earned third place overall. Yale did not enter.
"Our team is much stronger than Yale's," Yin said.
The Wolff Cup, which Harvard will now keep for the next year, is named after Patrick Wolff, the only grandmaster to play on both sides of the Harvard-Yale chess tournament. He spent two years as an undergraduate at Harvard and two years as an undergraduate at Yale.