PREVIEW by Steven Trezise:

With Matt Peek TGM having finally bowed out of the World Championship before the Final, after 22 consecutive WTC match wins, it seems fitting that once again two of the top three seeds, both tournament masters, have reached the Final and will be battling it out to take over his title.

Péter and Rob are the first European players in the Final since Heli Niemi (FIN) was the runner-up in 2001. The last time the top two were both from the northern hemisphere was in the very first World Championship in 1998, before the current knockout format had even started. Péter is (amazingly) the first-ever Hungarian Finalist and Rob is the first UK Finalist since Julia Schwarz (GBR) won the title in 2000. The winner will be the oldest World Champion since the knockout format started - Julia was a year younger than Rob is now when she won in 2000. If it is Péter, he will be the oldest World Champion in any format - I was 32 back in 1998. The winner, whoever it is, will be the first player since the knockout format started not to have yellow as their first-choice colour.

For once, I am particularly well-placed to know why the two Finalists have made it this far - one of them (Rob) knocked me out in the last 32 last year, the other (Péter) knocked me out in the last 32 this year! Digressing for a moment, if Péter wins the Final, his Round 2 opponent Peter Clay (AUS) could end up having lost to the World Champion in Round 2 two years in a row, having lost to Matt at that stage last year. Stranger still, if Rob wins, Peter Clay could end up having lost in Round 2 to the winner in 2003, the runner-up in 2004 and the 3rd placed player, Leah Sanders (AUS), in 2001 - and those are the only three years he has played in the WTC. No luck of the draw there!

Péter and Rob's styles are not too dissimilar. Perhaps the main difference from what I've seen of them is that Rob appears to play very efficiently and accurately in a very consistent way from to game to game whereas Péter, while mastering all the same skills, is a bit more unpredictable - brilliant in some games, just a little off the pace in others.

Overall, they are incredibly evenly matched - never have the two finalists been separated by just three Elo points, for example, meaning that they are 'expected' to finish their nine games with 90 TPs each. That won't happen of course (ok, it might, but it is not very likely) and if one player makes a particularly good start to the match while the other is playing nervously, they might be very hard to catch.

It is quite hard to find any clear pointers from Péter and Rob's earlier matches in this WTC. Péter has only played one seed (me in the last 32) but that is the only match he has won by less than 20 TPs apart from his QF with Niklas Andersson (SWE), who is improving very fast these days, and his semi-final with Viktoria Dobos (HUN), who had just knocked out the reigning champion. Rob on the other hand made slightly heavier weather of the unseeded players he met in the early rounds but has faced two seeds, Chris Hill (NZL) and Mike McManaway (NZL) in the later rounds since and his win in the second tiebreak game against Mike (which concluded the longest Tantrix tournament match ever at 10 games) showed that he has not been fazed by pressure situations in this WTC.

Bearing out how closely-matched they are, Péter and Rob have only met in a tournament once before, on 11 March 2003 in a two-game match in Group A of the European Championship. Péter won the first game 17-16 and Rob won the second 14-13 before going on to win the group and knock Péter out.

I'm not sure exactly what pointers can be taken from all of the above, except that it could be one of the best WTC Finals yet!