ICA Scholastic Chess Camp Teaneck Week 8 Report!
Street Fighter vs. Dodgeball, or Hadouken!

One of our favorite ways to make dodgeball more interesting is to do the so-called dodgeball special. After repeated requests from the campers throughout the summer, we decided to bring this idea back for week eight. This week, we played Ken’s theme from the classic video game Street Fighter 2 and had the kids shout “Hadouken” (Ken’s signature line) while throwing the dodgeballs like the fireballs that fly out of some characters’ hands in the game.

Aside from this, our tournament winners were Jacob Pollard, who won the first section in a tremendous upset as he was the second lowest rated player in the field, and Levi Eliason, a last-minute sign-up, in section two. 

The Best Students in each group were: Danny Paley in Slava’s group (Danny outhustled Dillon by 1/8 of a point on the last day with some great answers in Slava’s tactical quiz), Christian Lavrinovich in Ivette’s group, Levi Eliason in Gary’s group, and Minwoo Lee in Alessandro’s group.

Kaylie Shelton won for Problem Solving, and Ryley Chen won Best Notation. Dillon Shelton, who wanted to resign against Slava on move 27 in their simul game but was not allowed to do so, just beat out Danny for most moves in the Survival in a Simul event as a result of not giving up.

The Sports Group winners were Christian Lavrinovich, Rafi Ptashny, and Danny Paley; Christian also won for Dodgeball (despite a furious challenge by Kaylie Shelton, who had two great hat catches this week). Max Geberovich was the winner for Art.

On Friday, the relay race winning team was “Know-where” (the name of a planet from the “Avengers” movie franchise, off of which all the team names were based).  It comprised Dillon, Roen, Robert, and Avinash. The blitz/bughouse winners were team “Tennis Ace,” (team names were sports-themed) which was composed of Raymond and Levi.  “Tennis Ace” was tied with “Dodgeball Amateurs” (Davin and Jesse) after seven regulation rounds and defeated them in the bughouse playoff when Raymond checkmated with a pair of same-colored bishops to win the tournament.