We had an amazing 21 people show up for this afternoon’s tournaments, playing a total of 8 complete brackets. That is a lot of backgammon! Breakside was a good location – I was a little worried about being right along the street but traffic was very light and it was well shaded. When a breeze came through, it was almost pleasant… Almost. 🙂 Actually it was quite tolerable in spite of the 5th or 6th day of 90 degree plus temperatures.
Learning from my mistakes last time, I held off entering myself into a bracket until I had most everyone else up and running. It made the start easier for me to manage; although it did take a while to get people paired off, it wasn’t an unreasonable wait to get things rolling.
As with last time, more brackets means more winners, but the theme of the day was that winners keep winning. I won two of the brackets myself, as did David, as did Jeremy. The other two were won by Kyle and Tim, respectively.
We had a good amount of people rolling off the brackets and into casual pick-up play, which is as it should be. Play was pretty continuous from before 2:00 until about 5:45. Being at a new location, we also got a good amount of interest from passers-by, who were interested to learn that there is a Portland Metro Backgammon Club. Hopefully a few of them will show up at a future event as participants. One of the “advertising” side effects of the tour – gets people playing backgammon in front of people who don’t come only to our usual haunts…
The event also really shook up the race for Player of the Year. Both Mark A and Bodger had relatively rough days, each playing 3 matches but winning only 1 apiece. On the other hand, Kyle, who has been running hot the past couple of events, had a 100% day… As of this moment, Kyle has jumped past both Mark and Bodger, and with a 68% win rate is the current front-runner for player of the year! But it is really anyone’s guess how it will all end – David and Jeremy are both sporting 60%+ win rates and pretty high # of matches played. If you are up for the challenge, anyone who comes pretty consistently through the rest of the year and wins a lot could easily take the trophy for 2022…
Anyway, it was a good afternoon, I hope everyone had as much fun as I did, and I hope to see you all again in a couple of weeks when we try out Moon & Sixpence. Although – important note – we’re starting that one even later in the day, since they apparently don’t open until 3:00… See you then!
-Mark