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1 1st Blitz (7-minute) Tantrix Championship
Qualifier 2 - Saturday 23 August 2003
3900
7 5 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Report: Congratulations to Rick Yagodich (GBR), who won Qualifier 2 on tiebreak with 5.5/7 and to 2nd lowest-seeded player in the tournament Katarina Krausova (SVK) who put in by far the best Tantrix tournament performance ever by a Slovakian player to finish 2nd on the same score as Rick and claim the other SF place. 3rd place went to Péter Petrecz ITM (HUN) just 0.5 points behind, with Matthias Neumeister (GER) just behind him on tiebreak. Péter had recovered from 1/3 by winning his last four games and Matthias had recovered from 0/2 by winning his last five!
Well done also to Joe Ruby (USA), probably the fastest player in the world who was leading the whole competition after R5, and to Attila Mikulan (HUN), who reached the U16 SFs by finishing 6th and 11th overall with 4.5 points and 4.0 points respectively, and to GBR who won the team challenge again thanks to their top 3 (Rick in 1st, Rob Morton in 5th and Eleanor Gordon in 9th - the latter two were the 2nd and 3rd best UK players last time too!) scoring 14.0, well ahead of HUN, up from 3rd last time, and GER. GBR had a big advantage in this competition though with far more entrants than any other country.
It had been very tight at the top with one round to go, with Rob, Rick, Joe and Katarina all on 4.5, three more players on 4 and two more on 3.5. R7 wins for Katarina v Joe and for Rick v James Preen (CAN) plus Rob's loss to Péter decided the top three. Strangely, Katarina in 2nd ended up not playing anyone else in the top 5 (except Rob to whom she was unfortunate to lose by default, though that also left her the only player not to lose a single game in actual play during the tournament) and Matthias in 4th did not meet anyone in the top 6. This had a lot to do with the big shifts in the order over the last few rounds, with Péter and Matthias coming up from nowhere and never meeting Katarina who was near the top all the way through.