Tantrix Tournament Reports

[steven]

Béla Illanicz HUN ("zumimaci") v Paul Hirst AUS ("phirst")

This was the first WTC match to go to a tiebreak and very exciting it was too. I had more than a passing interest in it because in the unlikely event of me surviving R1, the winner of this match would be my opponent in R2.

Béla won g1 by a single tile but by the time I started to have a look at the match, Paul was in the middle of a 3-game winning streak, also taking no less than 5 time penalties off Béla in the process.

Paul also looked to me to be by far the better player of the two, playing accurately and cleverly, whereas Béla, while clearly no slouch and capable of some very good play himself, seemed to me to be trusting too much to luck.

I left, pleased that Paul was winning, both because I like to see the best player win and for the selfish reason that I find it very irritating playing against players who do trust to luck a bit too much because if they suddenly hit a good run with the tiles, they can be incredibly embarrassing and frustrating to play against.

Maybe I had misjudged Béla's style or maybe I was right and he hit one of those good runs of tiles, because when I came back two games later he had won both of them and was leading by 60.5-59.5 TPs going into the tiebreak.

Tiebreak game: TM!phirst-20-zumimaci-28-2003-09-09-1423

Game 7 was a scrappy but nail-biting affair. Some of the moves early in the game made me look twice at what colour each player was, because it looked as if they were trying to make the best moves for their opponents, not themselves!

Move 7 by Paul is a particularly vivid example, where he appears to try to turn Béla into a 12-tile loop which I would have said was virtually certain to win the game at that point. Paul did later turn Béla's line away again, so maybe there was more to move 7 than met the eye.

What could explain the weird moves? Well, either I was not seeing what they were seeing (more than possible) or, a bit more likely, the length of the match was getting to them - they had been playing non-stop for over 3 hours by this point and it was after 1 am for Paul in Australia!

Move 7 did not lose the game for Paul - getting his lines fragmented from early on while Béla's main line took centre-stage was his real downfall, but by the time the bag was empty, the fat lady was already halfway through the second verse and Béla ended up winning the game by 8 tiles and the match by 77.3-62.7 TPs.

Well done to Béla for winning the last three games in a row to clinch the match, but you have to feel sorry for Paul, who also lost out in R1 last year, that time by just 1.4 TPs.