Coup de chapeau

 I'm on my way home from Cambridge as I write this, after a weekend's othelloing. The finals are still going on, although as usual I was never in contention to finish in the top four. I did, however, impress myself yesterday by beating the entire Tastet family (or at least the three representatives of it who came to the tournament) one after the other in ascending order of seniority. And Marc assures me that 'coup de chapeau' is the French equivalent of the English 'hat-trick', and I'm not going to turn down the opportunity of making a hat-related remark when it's so appropriate.

Apart from that, I wasn't all that impressive over the eleven rounds - but I wasn't as absolutely terrible as anyone who's seen the two of my games that were covered on liveothello.com might think! Those were by far my worst games of the weekend, and I happen to think I played fairly well in most of the others. Honest. I finished the first day on four wins out of seven, having also beaten Carlo Affatigato and lost reasonably good games to Imre Leader and Emmanuel Lazard and one awful live-internetted one against Matthias Berg, and felt in good shape to achieve my usual aim of 50% success - maybe even having only played the best players at the event.

But this morning, after being wiped out ruthlessly by Takuji Kashiwabara in my second liveothello disaster and then losing a game I really felt I should have won against Luke Plowman, I was very much in the mood to inflict a vengeful wipeout on his little sister Anya (although all of Guy's kids, like so many people nowadays, are disturbingly grown up nowadays; it's almost enough to make me think I might be getting old, but that's just crazy talk). Anyway, I couldn't quite manage to completely wipe her out, and decided to pretend I was just too gallant to do it, only for Anya to jump in before I even had a chance to proclaim how nice I am and remind me I was the first person ever to wipe her out, years ago when she actually was extremely young.

But that only brought me out to five out of ten, and the final game against Emmanuel Caspard didn't work out as I'd hoped, though it looked for a while like I might end up on top, so five out of eleven is what I had to settle for. Still, a good weekend's fun all round!