Merry Christmas With Morphy On Monday!
ICA Winter Chess Camp Begins!
We had quite a productive day on Monday at ICA Teaneck as the campers learned about the Morphy Mate and the legendary, Paul Morphy, for who it is named. While the mate was never played by Morphy in a game our detective work suggests it is named after him because of this particularly famous game between him and Louis Paulsen at the 1st American Chess Congress in 1857: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1242884 . Morphy sacrificed the queen on f3 with his 17th move and eventually forced a winning position. The most hilarious point about the game is when he played Bh3 and Paulsen moved his rook to the untrained eye it looks like a natural move to retreat the rook from danger but in reality, Paulsen would have been happy if that was Morphy’s intent. The real point of Bh3 is to finish with checkmate via Bg2+ and Bxf3# so the Rook move by Paulsen is done to create a flight square for the king on f1 not at all to save his piece (he was up a queen and would have been thrilled to give away the rook for the menacing bishop).
After some positions related to the checkmate, where Max Yevelev proved best, the campers headed outside for some Dodgeball. Davin Shin scored two catches to gain two points and the lead in this sports event.
After lunch the campers sat down for tournament play. Once again Davin Shin, the wily veteran, managed to score three wins in all three games to escape victorious.
Tremendous Tuesday In Glen Rock On Christmas Day!
Due to the whole deal with Santa sliding down a chimney and kids staying up to feed him milk and cookies we didn’t have many takers for camp in Teaneck on December 25th and so held it only in Glen Rock. The best students were Annie Cohen in Slava’s group (the focus was Scholar’s mate) Avital Nozic in Hana’s group, and Max Goberman in Diana’s group.
Outside during sports Michael Vern earned the dodgeball prize, while his brother Alex won for Soccer.
Since we didn’t have that many campers we held a blitz/bughouse tournament which was won by Thomas and Gregory.
The campers were also discussing the theoretical mathematical conclusion that 7 x 13 = 28 something professors Abbot and Costello discuss in this youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzxVyO6cpos
Remember don’t believe everything they teach you in school, and when in doubt talk to our math teacher Zoya.
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