ICA 20th Anniversary Teaneck Scholastic Summer Camp Week 5; The Art of Miming!

Week five was probably one of the best weeks for our Teaneck location because all of the kids were extremely well behaved and cooperative and had fun doing any activity organized by the coaches.  It definitely helped that most of them were ten or older and we had a great deal of entertaining adventures in the camp.

Our unique contest for the week was a miming competition where the kids couldn’t use words or props to act something or other out for the rest of us to try and guess (we also awarded a prize for writing down the most correct guesses). In the end Jacob Volynsky’s inspired imitation of a Gorilla beat out the ridiculous “Klevak” imitation by Matt Centrella, and Kevin Wei’s silly imitation of his brother Alec, or Alec’s imitation of Daniel Paley’s victory dance from the prior weeks.  The winners for most correct amount of guesses were Alec Wei and Yale Fang who both figured out eight out of the eleven miming acts correctly. 

In the classic chess tournament of the week it was of little surprise that Matt Centrella, who had a five hundred point rating advantage over his next closest competitor, won in section one.  What did surprise both me and NM Chris Welcome was the quality of the last round game between David Liu, and Yale Fang.  Both played a respectable Italian game with David getting the center as white, and Yale having counter play on the “a” file as black.  The game ended with a crucial blunder by David, and Yale ending it in style with a sweet rook sacrifice to force checkmate. Section two had two winners as both Alec Wei, and Darin Fang tied for first place.

The best students in the study groups were Anabelle Volynsky in Ivette’s group, Yale Fang and Alec Wei in Slava’s group (Alec did the best in memorizing the game of the week between Lasker and Thomas, and the subsequent variations that led to a shorter checkmate, while Yale did the best in the problem solving covering simple endgames). Matt Centrella was the best student in NM Chris Welcome’s group.

The simul survival winners were Matt Centrella (the themed simul opening was the Sicillian Dragon) in the rated section, and Moshe Trapedo in the unrated section.

Taddeo Wang won for problem solving as well as the individual blitz tournament for kids signed up from 3-5 pm.

The blitz bughouse winners were team “US” which was made up of Kevin Wei, and David Liu.

For the sports there were three sports groups with Kevin Wei winning the youngest group, Taddeo winning the middle group, and Andrew Volynsky winning the oldest group.

“rad” Chad Yang won the week long dodgeball event.

The winner for the usual Friday relay race competition was team “Klevak” which was led by “rad” Chad, and included the Wei brothers, Kevin, and Alec.

Lastly, this week during the full day option we had “Math with Zoya” and for the oldest group which was dubbed the “Magnificent Four” (i.e. they all worked hard and were well behaved) the winner was Darin Fang, despite the fact that the other “three musketeers” breathed down his neck the whole week. In the younger group both Kishan, and Kevin worked hard and solved problems with enthusiasm but in the end since Kevin was the youngest and the most interested Zoya felt it fair to award the crown to him.