We had a pretty good turnout for today’s tournament – 10 people! 7 were repeats from last month, and we had 3 new folks, Roland and the brother/sister duo of Lee and Rochelle. 10 didn’t seem like enough to split into two brackets, and so we did it as one bracket, with a couple of play-in matches. Or, alternatively, a 16 person bracket with 6 byes…
My first match was against Tim. My recollection is that he won the first, I won the second, he won the third, then it starts getting blurry. I believe he got me down 4-1, but post Crawford I managed to gammon him with the cube turned to win the match. There was a position or two of interest, but I didn’t think to take pictures at any point, sorry. From there, I went on to play Sharon, then Rochelle, then Lee. Now not to give spoilers, but that was a tough road to the finals! I think in every match I ended up coming from behind to win post-Crawford.
Now Lee had the advantage of having watched me play Rochelle, plus he was well rested after defeating Nathan and Bryan – no play-in match for him. I took an early cube in game 1, then lost by a gammon, putting us to Crawford in game 2. Well, no problem, I’d been coming back post-Crawford all afternoon. Lee was having none of it, he slammed me and won the final in 2 games!
Rochelle squeaked past Bryan in the consolation flight, and so the dynamic duo took 1st & 3rd on their first tournament. I told them we like to have a newcomer win the first time so they get hooked and come back – well done all.
Here’s the summary of rankings after today’s event:
| Player | Initial Elo Rating | Matches Played | Matches Won | Final Elo Rating |
| Bryan | 1573.0 | 5 | 3 | 1570.74 |
| Mark | 1546.4 | 4 | 3 | 1570.53 |
| Lee | 1500.0 | 3 | 3 | 1558.55 |
| Rochelle | 1500.0 | 3 | 2 | 1519.96 |
| Kevin | 1521.3 | 3 | 1 | 1502.39 |
| Sharon | 1496.7 | 3 | 1 | 1488.05 |
| Nathan | 1471.1 | 3 | 2 | 1485.37 |
| Martin | 1495.8 | 2 | 0 | 1468.10 |
| Roland | 1500.0 | 2 | 0 | 1467.00 |
| Tim | 1475.8 | 2 | 0 | 1449.45 |
See you all next month!
-Mark