One more othello post

I didn't mention that I came either fifth or sixth, depending on whether Pierluigi had a better BQ than me, which he probably had. Well above the half-way mark that I normally aim for, although not high enough to get me to the world championship unless practically everyone else doesn't want to go - and since it's in Holland this year, everyone does.

For the benefit of people who don't know much about othello, yes, it's the one that sort of looks like Go, only with discs that are black on one side and white on the other. More people call it reversi nowadays, which is the older, non-trademarked name. There's a world championship every year which three people from each country qualify for - in this country it's the top two in the nationals, plus the winner of the British Grand Prix, a series of smaller tournaments that I hardly went to any of this year, for one reason or another.

As for "BQ", that stands for Brightwell Quotient, the tie-breaking calculation for people who finish a tournament with the same number of wins. It's complicated, and made a teensy bit more so by the long-standing tradition that all that kind of thing at the nationals is done by Adelaide with pencil and paper, rather than one of those new-fangled computer things. This year it was necessary to work out the BQ for the three women who finished equal on points, so as to decide which two of them played-off for the spot on the women's team at the world championship - I double-checked Adelaide's calculations, with the aid of numerous people looking over my shoulder and pointing out my basic arithmetical errors (I multiplied 41 by 7 and got 288 at one point). A hard day-and-a-half's othelloing is very tiring and brain-draining.