Month: September 2025

We had a nice turnout for this month’s tournament – 14 players, including a couple of new folks and a couple we haven’t seen in a while. We nearly had 15, but one person locked the keys in the car and couldn’t make it…

We had two brackets, one of 6, and one of 8. In a change, I labeled the bracket of people who didn’t enter the side pool the “A” bracket this time. Round 1 had Joel over Chris, Tim over newcomer Steve, and Mark A over newcomer Nate. Tim later played Nate in the consolation bracket, and told me he learned that Nate had found out about the club from one of our Tour of Patio events – 3 years ago. So getting out there does work to recruit new players, eventually. Anyway – eventually Joel won the bracket over Mark A, with Tim taking the Consolation bracket.

In the “B” bracket, round 1 had Howard over Nick, Bodger over Jeremy C (back for his second event in two weeks), Ed over Larry, and me over Kyle. Howard went on to win the bracket, defeating me in the final. Kyle made up for his slow start by winning the Consolation bracket.

Here’s a cube decision from my first game with Kyle – so the score is 0-0 in a match to 5. Kyle threw this cube out there while I was taking a bite of my sandwich, and it gave me something new to chew on…

I had to kind of talk this one out. Kyle does still have two checkers back, and a lot of ground to cover before he gets them around, so it’s not a “too good” kind of situation. But I am on the bar, and Kyle has a lot of rolls that point on my blot in his homeboard. Ultimately, I reasoned that if I had two on the bar, I would clearly pass – and it was reasonably likely that would be the case after his next move, so I should let it go. And that’s correct! XG reckons that I have 28.5% winning chances, which is not so bad. But Kyle has 38% gammon chances, which is a lot. Taking would have been a -0.403 pentablunder.

It was a good day of backgammon. Next regular tournament is scheduled for October 19 – see you there!

-Mark

We had a good turnout for the penultimate qualifier of 2025 – 14 players came to participate in the tournament. There were an additional 8 or so players who were there for Sande’s casual meetup at the same time, and so backgammon definitely took over the space for the day.

Leah & Kashic, by default, took the top spots for the Women’s qualifier. Rather than have them just play each other, I dealt them into the overall bracket, which then played out 3 rounds to determine the finalists; but due to the length of the matches, they did not settle a first/second for the day.

First round had Howard over Dave, Leah over Larry, Pete over Kashic, me over Bodger, Jeremy C (a newcomer) over Tim, Jim over Joel, and Steve over Chris. Second round had Leah over Howard, Pete over Steve, Jeremy over Jim, and I took the bye. I used the break to go hobnob with the casual meetup crew, and play a few games against Mark A, who showed up to play and hang out but wasn’t feeling well enough to compete.

Then the critical round 3, where Jeremy (C not K) took me out to take a spot in the championship off his first tournament appearance! Pretty impressive, really – watch out for this guy!

The other finalist spot came down to Leah versus Pete. Now, neither of them had brought a board, so they started out playing on Tim’s board, since he was taking part in the chouette that broke out after round 1 finished. But then Tim had to leave, and so they finished on my board, since I was done losing by then. I did go ahead and record the second half of their match, but I haven’t transcribed it yet. However, I can tell you that the winner was Leah!

With that, Leah has spots in both the men’s and the women’s championship tournament, which we’ll navigate somehow. There is precedent – in our first ever championship qualifier many years ago now, Molly A won a spot in the men’s championship. Leah has declared that she’s going to win both events and also Player of the Year, so – notice given. She is, in fact, currently leading the race for Player of the Year as well, just ahead of Jim and Howard. Trifecta, anybody?

We will have our normal monthly tournament next weekend, and so I hope to see you all back there again. Until then!

-Mark