We had a fair showing for this month’s tournament, in spite of the fabulous weather – 14 players showed up for the event. It was mostly an array of the usual suspects, but we had two new participants: Cici (who came last month but too late to get into the draw), and Bart (who came over from Enterprise specifically and only to play backgammon, but then too also to play trumpet at a gig later in the day).
14 does not quite make two perfect brackets, and so we had a 6/8 split. In the “A” bracket, I faced off against Matt H, Bodger took on Max, and Mark A drew Dave. Note that Dave, Max, and I were the only three in the side pool this month, and all three of us lost our first round match! I promised a second round bye to whichever pair finished first, and Bodger took that prize. Mark A defeated Matt in the second round, but then lost to Bodger in the final. This was a critical match, in that both players now have 13 2022 tournament matches, and they are nearly tied in wins: 10 versus 9 after today. I won’t reveal who is ahead, but these two are clearly the front runners for “Player of the Year 2022”. In the consolation bracket, I beat out Dave and Matt beat out Max, leading to Matt and I having a rematch in the consolation final! Fortunately for me, I was able to reverse my first round results, and beat out Matt in our second face-off. As he noted, he’d had a few more beers by that point, which probably helped me.
In the “B” bracket, the draw pitched newcomers Bart and Cici against one another, then Paola versus Nathan, Richard versus Terry (who is not a newcomer, but this was his first one back in a long while), and Dirk versus Steve. Second round had Cici versus Steve, and Nathan versus Terry; then in the final it was Steve taking first place over Terry. In the consolation bracket, in a repeat of the “A” bracket, Cici and Bart met again for the consolation championship! But sadly for Bart, he was not able to reverse the results of the first round, and Cici took the consolation championship.
Hopefully we’ll get used to blue skies and warm weather, and also fewer people will have sniffles, and we’ll get back to some higher numbers in the future. But summer has a lot of other attractions, and it’s normal for our numbers to dip for the season. I’ll try to make it more attractive to people by providing some changes of scenery and maybe even some different formats for the summer series. Stay tuned, I’ll let you know once I figure out what I mean by that. Until next time, roll on!
-Mark