I finished the British Othello Championship 2024 in sixth place out of fourteen competitors, winning five out of nine games, and thus achieving what genuinely is my usual goal in othello competitions of "better than fifty percent success", the exact meaning of which phrase can be twisted to suit the results I actually achieve. You can certainly make out that I achieved my aims this time around, and give Stephen Fry an appropriately celebratory script to read out in the next documentary about me!
And I was in fact pleasantly surprised and impressed by how well I played - I beat Iain Barrass, which takes some doing, and newcomer Elijah Everett, who's actually quite good, and even when losing to the likes of Guy, Ian and Marius I felt like they were the kinds of games where it could have gone my way if they'd let their concentration slip and made the slightest of blunders. I also lost 33-31 to Digby when I probably was well on top at one point, but that's a minor blip, and he played well too!
Guy became the new British Champion, beating Imre in the final to win his first title since 2014, that time when I came second. I haven't boasted about that for a long time, have I? I came second in the Nationals once. Without exercise or anything, but with a lot of good players not being there or losing games they probably deserved to win against me.
So in summary, I'm extremely happy with my othello performance, and grateful to everyone who came to the competition and made it happen!
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