GrandMaster Camp Week 2

The second week of the ICA Grandmaster Camp saw three groups of competitive students eager to learn as well as to play tennis, blitz, bughouse, and some very competitive games of soccer.

            The lowest group by rating was taught by the newest addition to the ICA summer staff, Grandmaster Gabor Kallai from Budapest, Hungary. This week, his lessons primarily focused on the Queen’s Gambit and similar openings and the typical middlegame positions arising from these openings. The group also consisted almost entirely of new ICA campers who all seemed to enjoy themselves and will hopefully be returning in the future. This week’s winner for the group was Ryan Schiller, who absorbed the information taught in the lessons and was able to demonstrate this in the training positions the group played.

            The next group by rating was taught by frequent ICA tournament winner Grandmaster Alex Stripunsky. This week, his group focused on sacrifices on f7 and h7 (as well as f2 and h2). Opponents should fear this group’s newly honed attacking skills because, as student and ICA Junior Instructor Ethan Klein said, “I will never miss an opportunity to sac on h7 again.” The group’s winner was William Graif, who scored an impressive 22 out of 24 points on the test!

            The highest group by rating was taught by longtime ICA Summer Coach Grandmaster Alex Chernin. His lessons this week focused on “eliminating the defender,” which the students quickly learned was not the tactical idea they had previously known, but was instead a deep positional concept. The group’s winner for the week was ICA Coach Max Schwartz, who had fallen slightly behind on points going into the last day due to some poor play in the training positions but managed to score the highest on a rather difficult final test. Special mention should also be made of Dex Webster, who was the youngest and lowest-rated student in the group but managed to keep pace with the rest of the students and proved an invaluable member of the team analysis sessions.

            The students left camp this week with greatly improved chess skills, sore muscles from some very intense soccer matches, new vocabulary learned from the popular spelling game Ghost, and some new friends to challenge to games of online chess when they get home.