September Backgammon Tournament Results

First of all, I should have split us into two brackets. Don’t know what I was thinking – we started out with 12 players, which is enough to have two brackets (although a 6 person bracket is not ideal) – but then 3 more people showed up late, making 15 total, which is almost 16, which really ought to be two brackets, not one. Because with a single bracket, it’s just going to take a lot longer to get done… Which it did. The final match of the day didn’t end until almost 6:00, 5 full hours after we started! Not even the final two players were that interested in still being there… though I (naturally) was eager to see how it turned out.

Anyway – I’ll remember the lesson for next time.

We had three players for whom this was the first time they came to one of our events – Lor, Kilion, and Nitan; plus for Carlos it was his first tournament (although he came to the chouette last week, so in that sense he’s a seasoned pro).

I tried a somewhat different approach to the bracket this time, and I think I’m onto something there – inspired by the brackets they used in the Minneapolis tournament I went to earlier this month, I did a more structured “top bracket/bottom bracket” approach after the first round, so rather than put any two random players with 1 win/1 loss against each other, I tried to match people who went win-lose against people who went lose-win, to try to prevent the kind of situation we had last month where it took Stephanie 5 matches to win an 8 person bracket… The approach I took meant that the first place would be decided definitively with 4 matches – and it was! For second place, I had two places – the loser of the finalist match, and also the winner of everyone who had lost a match before, which I think took 5 matches to resolve. Like I said, should have been two brackets, and then it would have been 3 matches/4 matches to resolve, and should have taken an hour or so less time…

So to the results: Max was this month’s big winner, taking down first Brad, then me, then Leah, then Lor in the finals. Lor, who you’ll recall was a first timer, thus walked off with the first of the second place wins. Oh, and Max also won the side pool (which was fairly small this time around, but still…) With that, Max also shoots to the top of this year’s consolidated scores, having 10 wins out of 13 matches in tournament play, an impressive 77% rate! I didn’t get to watch their match, but report is that Max took the first game, then doubled Lor in the second game. Lor took, and proceeded to almost immediately hand the cube back to Max, making the second game the deciding one for the match! That’s a fun little thing you can do when you’re down 3-away/2-away – if it’s a take, then it’s an automatic redouble. Didn’t work out for Lor, but it’s the right strategy!

To cut the suspense, I’ll just tell you the other second place came down to a match between Julie and Leah. Julie entered the lower bracket early, losing her first match to Stacey. From there, she proceeded to redeem herself with wins over first Stephanie (one of last month’s winners, recall) and then me before facing Leah. Leah took a little longer to get there, beating Marge and Bo before losing to Max, then beating Brad to get to the final. And their match followed a similar pattern to the one between Max and Lor: Julie took the first game, then doubled Leah in the second game. Leah held the cube for a little while before offering it back, by which point Julie was tempted to drop due to the game having turned against her. But, based on a desire to wrap it up and get home to her long suffering pets, Julie took. Leah proceeded to make good on her turnaround, although not without leaving a couple of shots that could easily have turned the game around again in Julie’s favor.

Thanks everyone for coming out today – we’ll all hope for better pandemic conditions and maybe an inside meetup for next month – today started to get a little chilly once the rain started up, and that’s not going to get better over the next couple of months. Stay safe and healthy, and see you at the next one!

-Mark