How the May Open was Won & Lost
You might intuitively think that the most important thing to do if you want to win a Tantrix tournament is to win the games against the other top players. That was certainly true in the Inaugural Masters Tournament, where if you were in the top 6, your results against the other top players who had been in your Zone ended up being counted in both your Zone and the Final, though even in that event the winner, Alex, lost to the runner-up, Zenon.
Looking at the cross-table for this tournament, however, Britta actually lost all four games against Mike & Peter, who came 2nd and 3rd. Mike lost one game to Peter, one to Steven in 4th and both games to Jason who came 5th.
It was the number of points piled up against the four "weaker" players which really made the difference in the end. Taking only their games against each other, the top five were incredibly close ... and in fact Britta had the worst record of the five. From the table below, it's not hard to see where the biggest of Britta's many strengths lies and why she overtook Mike, nor why Steven (and to a slightly lesser extent Jason) lost touch with the top three. This is probably a big lesson for most of us - i.e. one needs to concentrate just as hard against the supposedly weaker players as against the top players.
| Name |
v. higher 4 |
v. lower 4 |
Total |
| TPs |
% |
Posn |
Bot 4 |
% |
Posn |
Total |
% |
Posn |
| Britta |
75 |
47% |
5th |
129 |
81% |
1st |
204 |
64% |
1st |
| Mike |
83 |
52% |
1st |
118 |
74% |
2nd |
201 |
63% |
2nd |
| Peter |
80 |
50% |
3= |
104 |
65% |
3rd |
184 |
58% |
3rd |
| Steven |
82 |
51% |
2nd |
87 |
54% |
7th |
169 |
53% |
4th |
| Jason |
80 |
50% |
3= |
88 |
55% |
6th |
168 |
53% |
5th |
| Laszlo |
48 |
30% |
8th |
90 |
56% |
5th |
138 |
43% |
6th |
| Dave |
62 |
39% |
6th |
72 |
45% |
8th |
134 |
42% |
7th |
| Jim |
41 |
26% |
9th |
92 |
58% |
4th |
133 |
42% |
8th |
| Justin |
51 |
32% |
7th |
58 |
36% |
9th |
109 |
34% |
9th |
For the top five, the "v. higher 4" columns include results against the four other players in the top 5 and the "v. lower 4" columns include results against those in 6th-9th. For the 6th-9th placed players, the same applies except that Jason's results are switched to the "v. lower 4" column.
Having said that, could it be instead that the "least consistent" player can make the biggest difference to the overall result? By that I mean the player who is capable of great results, but doesn't seem able to string enough of them together to be near the top himself? Dave is a good example. In fact, even in the previous tournament, he was the only player apart from Zenon to beat the winner, Alex! If you remove all Dave's results, Mike would come 1st ahead of Britta, Steven 3rd ahead of Peter and Jim 6th ahead of Laszlo. On such little things are tournaments won and lost - part of what makes them so intriguing! :-)
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Last Updated on 02/06/99
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