Champion
pepe (HUN)
Péter Petrecz (ITM) |
A record 174 players from the 25 countries whose flags appear above played in the 7th World Tantrix Championship ("WTC"), including 14 of the top 15 players in the world. We also welcomed first-ever WTC entrants from Spain, Singapore, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea and the Ukraine.
Many congratulations to no. 3 seed Péter Petrecz ITM (HUN) who is the new World Tantrix Champion, having beaten no. 2 seed Rob Morton ITM (GBR) from the UK by 93.6-85.4 TPs in a Final witnessed by up to 50 spectators at a time. Péter is the first World Tantrix Champion representing a country without English as its first language and, at 37, the oldest player ever to win the title. It caps an amazing year for Hungary, which also has the European and World Junior Champion in Tamás Gombkötő and won the World Team Championship for the second time. In fact, Hungary looked to be having a bad World Championship for a while, but their two players who survived to the last 16 ended up doing them proud.
Unseeded Viktoria Dobos (HUN) needed a tie-break game to win the play-off for 3rd place against unfortunate no. 9 seed Mike McManaway (NZL), the Tantrix inventor, who has now finished 4th in three World Championships but has never broken into the top three. Amazingly, these two players between them have played in no less than seven of the twenty matches that have gone to tiebreaks in the WTC this year!. Rising star Viktoria's most memorable achievement in the event, though, was in the last 16 where she brought to an end the incredible run of 22 World Championship match wins of no. 1 seed Matt Peek TGM (NZL), who had won the previous three World Championships.
Last year, Péter won the Plate competition for those knocked out of the main event in the last 64 or earlier and this year it was dominated by Hungary (again) and by Israel, having by far its best performance in a world event so far. The surprise but worthy winner was Alex Biryukov (ISR), with Zoltán Németh ITM (HUN) having to settle for the runner-up spot for the second time in three years. Miklós Hansel (HUN) edged out Galina Ryvchin (ISR) for 3rd place.
The WTC has over the years been mentioned in the press, radio and on TV in various parts of the world and the WTC home page alone is viewed around 25,000 times per year. Phase 1 of this year's Championship, involving all except the 80 highest-rated entrants, took place during August, Phase 2 whittled the last 128 down to 16 and The Finals found the new Champion from the last 16.
Archived data retrieved from The Original Pages
|
Visit TANTRIX.COM
TOURNAMENT HOME PAGE 
