Video created by Nina Pert!!
When I woke up on Monday morning, I couldn’t wait for the summer camp to start. I got ready and soon my Dad, my brother and I were in the car. When we arrived I helped set up the hall and the kitchen. Robin, Ben and James were also there. Eventually my friends started to arrive and we played some friendly games of chess.
Soon everyone was there and we played our first game – there were 6 teams and 6 captains. It was really fun playing in teams against your friends. Three teams lost and three teams won, but we didn’t mind, and after that we looked through our games with Dad and Robin to see what we could’ve improved. But just to refresh ourselves before our first training session we got a snack and went to play for a few minutes. Me and my friends climbed trees and started a movie I was making, which you can see on this page.
And it was soon that training started. I was in group A with my Dad, and we focused on openings. Group B weren’t as strong as group A but were still pretty good – they also looked at openings, but with Robin. Dad showed us a good way to play against the English Opening, and then we looked at a few other opening ideas. We stopped a few times to see if we could work out the move, but my favourite part of the training was trapping the queen, because I love it when I do that in my games and it makes me very happy.
Next was lunch time! The people who didn’t get a chance to look at their games had a chance to review them over lunch with Dad and Robin. Others played football with Ben & James, or helped me to make a movie of the day (make sure you have a look!)
After lunch we had our second game, followed by looking through our games again. That was followed by the second training session of the day. This time group A had Robin whilst Group B had Dad. We all looked at endgames this time. Finally it was time for the last game, followed by the prizegiving. Jerry’s team was the winning team, and the whole team won a prize.
On the second day we had our guest coach Chris Ward, who helped out looking through our games, coaching and watching how we were doing through the whole of the day. Chris also did a training session with both Group A and Group B. The second day was the same as the first day and we had a new winning team, which was Sarah’s team. They won by half a point over my team. I enjoyed the two days so much, and I’m sure everyone else did too.
Nina Pert