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