November 12, 2017 Backgammon Tournament Results

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