Month: November 2025

We had a fair turnout for this month’s regular monthly tournament – 13 players. After the blowout attendance at last week’s final qualifier, I wasn’t sure what to expect – only about 7 people registered. But it made for enough people to run a couple of brackets.

In the “A” bracket, first round had Andres over newcomer Hugues (more or less pronounced “Oogh”), Julie over Mark A, Joel over Bodger, and Ed getting the lucky-because-he-was-late bye. Julie went on to win the bracket over Andres, with Ed taking the Consolation bracket.

In the “B” bracket round one had me beating out Jeremy C, Dave over Kyle, and Howard over Tim. Howard won the bracket, with me taking second, and Dave won the consolation bracket.

I managed to record about 2.5 of my matches, so maybe some of it will make it onto YouTube in the coming days/weeks. We shall see.

With today’s event down, we do have an exciting development in the race for Player of the Year – Howard has now edged out Leah! There are still 3 events to go to finish the year (the two Championships and the December regular), so things could shift again, and of course Jim B is right behind them as well. PotY could go to any of the 3, honestly – and Larry D has a shot as well, although he’ll miss the next two events – but that means his total wins-losses can’t drop either…

Player	Tourn’s Attended	Matches Played	Matches Won	Wins-Losses	%
Howard Markowitz	18	52	31	10	59.62%
Leah Nash	5	14	12	10	85.71%
Jim Benson	7	19	14	9	73.68%
Larry Deckel	14	35	21	7	60.00%
Mark Danburg-Wyld	18	51	28	5	54.90%
Jeremy Krieger	5	14	9	4	64.29%
Ed Parecki	8	25	14	3	56.00%
Kyle Petersen	14	41	21	1	51.22%
Joel Nehl	16	42	21	0	50.00%
David Cohen	12	34	17	0	50.00%
Andres Claux	8	22	11	0	50.00%
Nathan Alter	6	18	9	0	50.00%
Mark Arel	12	35	17	-1	48.57%
Jeremy Conant	5	12	5	-2	41.67%
Bodger Millerd	18	47	22	-3	46.81%
Julie Bellman	11	29	13	-3	44.83%
Stephen Hoffman	8	15	6	-3	40.00%
Tim Emineth	17	43	18	-7	41.86%

Here’s a position that came up in my first round match against Jeremy C. I had just gotten extremely lucky – Jeremy rolled 6-6 after I hit him loose in my home board, and then my 4-4 is an excellent return roll!

When you roll doubles, it’s easier than average to make a blunder, because there are so many more options to consider. Here I didn’t think too hard or too long before settling on 8/4 (to cover the blot) 6/2(2) (to make another home board point), and then I paused to consider the last one, settling on 20/16 (to get more contact so I could hoover up more of his blots after he dances again on my much improved home board). This is not bad, only a -0.462 pentablunder. Sigh. The best move, 20/12*/4, is so amazingly better once you see it. But, you have to see it to play it. So, that was my worst move of the afternoon… Still, it is a dice game, so my luck factor helped cover for my poor play in the match (and in my next one too).

Next event will be the Women’s 2025 Championship, coming up on November 30th – see you there!

-Mark

We had a fantastic turnout for our final Championship Qualifier for the year – 20 players! Results were again, ahem, lopsided – 18 players in the Men’s, 2 in the Women’s. So I had everybody play in one big, raucous bracket, same as we did for Qualifier #3. And we came very close to repeating the result of that, having someone qualify for both the Men’s Championship and the Women’s Championship…

Sande’s casual was again happening at the same time, and so the backgammon players outnumbered even the warhammer(?) players. Lucky Lab was a crowded place.

Because of the size of the field, I decreed that we would stick to 5 point matches, in order to prevent the tournament running into the twilight hours. Certain people tried to get us there anyway – I had two matches which took 9 games to resolve. I would like to remind everybody that the doubling cube does exist and is allowed to be used.

Without going through all the details, for the women’s, Julie secured a bye and Paola secured her spot in the championship. For the men’s, Paul secured a bye and Larry got his spot. Our final list of contestants for the championships is:

Women’s: Kashic (defending champion, bye), Julie Bellman (bye), Leah Nash, Paola Nealon, Kathy Beatty

Men’s: Paul Swain (2023 champion, bye), Kyle Peterson, Cam Davis, Mark Danburg-Wyld (tournament director and all-around swell guy), Leah Nash (overachiever), Larry Deckel, Jeremy Conant

Scheduling is being worked out, I hope to get that announced in the coming days.

Here’s a tough position that came up in Julie’s match against Paul. Score is 2-2 in their match to 5, and the standoff has come to a critical point…

Julie correctly noted this was probably the most important move of the match for her. There are really only two candidate plays — 13/6 (and hope you don’t get hit), or 7/5* 7/2 (and hope you don’t get hit). Either way, there’s only one bad number for you on your opponent’s roll, but one move is significantly better than the other. After hitting, you are much less likely to leave a shot on your next roll, assuming that you are missed. 13/6 is a -0.232 blunder!

Julie made the correct move, but unfortunately for her, Paul did roll a 5 on his turn, and went on to win the match. Nonetheless, an exciting match for everyone concerned, except maybe Asell, her dog, who seemed to not understand what was taking so long.

See you all at the next one!

-Mark