This past Sunday, we had the Women’s Championship. It was a great event, everyone showed up. 🙂 Last year we had a couple of people who were not able to attend at the last minute, and so I was just pleased to have all my contestants make it…
Well, I should say ALMOST everyone – Julie’s friend Kathy, who came from out of town and qualified back in the spring, did not make it; but she was not really expected to.
So we had 4 contestants – Julie, Kashic, Leah, and Paola. After some horsing around for pre-tournament photos, we got them going, in that order: Julie versus Kashic (our 2024 champion, BTW), and Leah versus Paola.
Round 1, I recorded Julie versus Kashic, and I will get that posted to YouTube fairly soon. They had a drawn out battle, and also some controversy! In game 4, holding a 2 cube, Julie decided to redouble from the following position.
The board is shown from Kashic’s perspective. Would you take? Your board is crunched, and you have no landing spot for the back checkers, but you’re winning the race, and if you do manage to pull it off, 4 points wins you the match…
After some thought, Kashic did take the cube – correctly! It’s actually an enormous take, and right on the borderline of a no double for Julie. However, Kashic did not put the cube all the way on her side of the board, she put it closer to the middle; and Julie thought she was rejecting the cube! So Julie started to reset the board, leading to the controversy! The camera doesn’t let you rewind and play back on the device itself, so they had to recreate the position from memory (and came close); but then Julie also gave herself the two points for the drop, leading to further confusion when the game finished…
Fortunately, we got it all sorted out. With some luck and some persistence, Julie managed to unseat our defending champion.
In the mean time, Leah had swept over Paola almost 40 minutes ago. They were hanging out and chatting and generally doing fine; but Leah was eager to get the second match going. After 2 years in a row coming in second, she was out for blood.
Paola stuck around and played a chouette with me and Jeremy (Tim had also come by for a bit but left around this time). I also recorded Leah and Julie’s match, of course, and that too will go up on YouTube as soon as I process it.
But I won’t make you wait to find out the results… Leah started out strong, and came close to sweeping Julie as well. But after winning 4 games straight (for 5 points total), Julie began staging her comeback. She won a point, then another! And then – Leah got her win!
Congrats to Leah, our 2025 Women’s Backgammon Champion! And, with these two match wins, she also is back firmly in the lead for 2025 Player of the Year! With one event to go, three others (Howard, Jim B, and Paul) are within range to overtake her on that one – but they need to make it to the final tournament of the year (December 21st) and get 2-3 net wins to do so. We shall see what happens!
