Elementary School Nationals - Final Update

The Weibel K-6 team rallied from 5th place going into the final round and won the team competition and is now the National Elementary School championship team, tying with NYC Lab School and NYC Dalton but winning the 1st place trophy (and the $2,000 in scholarship money) on tiebreaks.  It was looking very bleak going into the last round, as the 6th round was another disastrous one for the top-seeded Weibel squad, having only picked up 1 point in the 6th round.  But the other top schools also faltered, leaving Weibel with an opening.  Down 1.5 points, but with 4 other teams ahead of Weibel, the mandate was to go for wins, no draws.   Unlike past years in the Nationals, this year Weibel finished strong, as all 4 team members (Kevin Moy, Michael Wang, Anthony Zhou and Steven Li) won their last game and had just enough juice to get the coveted 1st place trophy.  Getting a total of 18.5 points (out of 28) is a rather low score and certainly wasn't the score we were expecting, given an average team score of well over 1800, but it is certainly better to be lucky than to be good sometimes.

In addition, 6th grader Kevin Moy is also now a National Champion, having tied for first place (along with 4 others including Cupertino 6th grader Vignesh Panchanatham) with 6.0 out of 7.  5th grader Michael Wang finished in a tie for 6th place with 5.5 out of 7 and got the 8th place trophy.  Weibel Team practice member Abhishek Handigol also tied for 6th and finished with the 12th place trophy, also with 5.5.

In the K-1 division, Weibel faltered in the last round and wound in in 7th place. In the K-3 division, Weibel finished 10th.  Fremont's Mission San Jose Elementary tied for 1st place in the K-1 division and as such is a National Champion for the K-1 division.

Notable scores for the Weibel team representatives (out of 7.0)
K-6
Kevin Moy 6.0  (co-National Champion, gets the 5th place trophy)
Michael Wang 5.5  (8th place trophy)
Anthony Zhou 4.0

K-3
Anvi Surapaneni 4.5 (won 2nd place in the 800-899 class for K-3)
Atri Surapaneni 4.0

K-1
Louis Law 5.0 (won the 30th place trophy)
Oliver Wu 4.0
Vincent Wang 4.0