Tantrix Tournament Reports

[Mikem]

Sorry for the delay in posting this..

Last weekend's NZ Table Open had 14 entries including 3 players from Auckland, 2 from New Plymouth (Seb and Jason) , 1 Wellingtonian (Colin) and the rest with Nelson connections. Many of the players stayed at our house, and some arrived a few days early so we were able to get in some valuable practice – especially using chess clocks under time pressure. We took Matt, Shaun and Hilary sea-kayaking, and tries to take them caving, but this idea was resisted by Matt (I think he had heard rumours of a N.Hemisphere plot).

After a breakfast of hot croissants and plenty of coffee (some addicts even bought their own) the matches commenced on time at 8.30. Despite my worst fears, there were very few time-out interruptions (none more than 10 seconds or so) and all six round robin matches were concluded by 2pm (including a lengthy lunch break). At this stage the top 4 from each group would go through to the knockout.

In Group A both Matt and Mike were unbeaten (having drawn against each other), Derek -an American living in Nelson and Colin also got thru with Hilary, Seb and Phil Castle missing out.

Group B was very tight: Shaun, Jason and Scottie (Jungle’s neighbour) got thru, and Jungle himself and Britta were tied on 59.4 tp’s each. Jungle went thru as he had beaten Britta in their match. Marina was happy to have won 2 of her matches and nobody at this tournament was disgraced with every player winning at least one of their first round games.

The quarterfinals pitted Matt against Jungle (Matt won all 4 games).
Derek against Jason (a small win to Jason).
Mike against Scottie, and Shaun against Colin (a very close win to Shaun).

Saturday night all players except Seb and Jason had a riotous dinner at the local Indian Café (see Jason for the photo!). The Semifinals (best of 5 games) got underway in relaxed fashion on Sunday morning:

Matt against Jason: Won by Matt 62.6 to 37.4

Mike against Shaun: Won by Mike 51.7 to 28.3

The final (out of 6 games) started with a draw, followed by a win each.
Game 4 went to Matt, leaving Mike needing two small wins.
Game 5 was the big swinger, Matt played brilliantly to rescue a almost certain loss into an easy win, and Mike went into the last game needing to win by 18 tiles.

It didn’t happen! Matt was the very deserving winner (74.3 to 47.7). Through the tournament he had made consistently less mistakes than any other player, and was almost never in time trouble.

The next day we DID take Matt in search of NZ’s deepest cave system (Nettlebed). After 2 hours rugged hiking we finally found the tiny entrance called Blizzard Pot which descends thru 28km of passges and 900m of height loss! Somehow Matt avoided being tossed in, but there is always next year.

Most likely the tournament will be run in Nelson again and if so we will be able to offer accommodation to all out of town players. Book your tickets now...!! Thanks to all the players who entered this year and made the weekend so much fun. And thanks to Steven for inspiring us to run the first Table Comp outside the UK.

Mike McManaway

[Zorpolotta]

About the photos, I will send anyone a picture or two if they want it. If you want a picture just e-mail me at oneandonly@paradise.net.nz

Thanks

Jason.