ICA Scholastic Chess Camp Teaneck Week 3 Report! When a Bear and a Human Have a Hot Dog eating contest to celebrate the American Independence Day!

What is downright the best way to celebrate July 4^th?

According to us its to have an “Independence Day blitz tournament” (Ezra Landa and Raymond Wang drew for first place after Ezra escaped via stalemate against Raymond in their individual game) and then while feeding popsicles to the kids watch the greatest competitive eater of all time Kobayashi (no it is not Joey Chestnut Sean!) try to eat more hotdogs than a giant bear. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54S2EBoh1Gk

You are certainly welcome parents!

The rest of the week proved full of fairly standard stuff as our tournament groups were won by Kento Numakura in section 1 (Kento sacrificed a pawn in an unsound way to keep Kevin’s king in the center to win the final decisive game), Ezra Landa in section 2, and Nathan “my mom was a lawyer and dad works for Chase bank” Cuttler in section three.

Unsurprisingly, as is quite typical the winners in the study groups were Kento in Slava’s group (although he and Raymond were tied Kento won on the final study question), Ezra and Christian Lavrinovich in Ivette’s group, and Soohan Cho in Justin’s group.

The Onur siblings, Eva Maya, and Max won the problem solving event by doing six problems each, while Charles Jinn scored a surprise checkmate in the last day simul game to overtake Nathan Cuttler who was leading the event.

Outside in the field Soohan, Yakov, and Kento won the youngest to oldest sports groups, while Charles Jinn once again (three weeks in a row now!) conquered the dodgeball field.  Charles had scored so many points on catches, and cone shots that even after skipping one day of camp on July 4^th he was still comfortably ahead of everybody.

Anahit and Christopher were our resident art winners for the week, while in a unique twist Kento Numakara won our “Siri Contest.”  The point of the contest was to ask Siri the best, funniest, and most philosophically deep question. While Charles may have won had he gone with “Where exactly did America go wrong” as he intended instead of his question “Why did America vote Trump,”  Kento stole the show with the moving, though provoking, and downright hilarious “Siri if a phone dies do you die?”

Congrats Kento and see everyone in week 4!