Life in the Lubbock

Although there are possibly worse global calamities than me coming last in an othello tournament, it's still deeply upsetting. But on the other hand, I don't think I played particularly badly in all but one of my games (my one against Frederic Auzende is one to forget), and I did win three out of ten, and it really was a very strong field. And I only came last by one Brightwell-quotient tiebreaker point, so that barely counts.

I was responsible for taking people's money, which meant knowing who people were - always a weak point for me - so I took the precaution of asking everyone their name even if I'd met them enough times that I should know who they are. I follow Dogbert's rule of etiquette, that if you don't know someone's name it's probably best not to guess. I did start making an effort to remember what people look like: Mark van Heere, my first opponent, is extremely tall, wears glasses and has a Manchester United tracksuit top, so I figured I'd always recognise him in future unless he changed his clothes, started wearing lenses or shrank. But then I noticed that a whole lot of the players this weekend fell into the 'extremely tall' bracket - it was like living in the land of giants, seriously - so I got despondent about my height and decided not to bother remembering people's names after all.

We were strangely short of British competitors, just me and Imre Leader, but had fifteen foreigners to make up for it. I was pretty unspectacular throughout, but Nicky van den Biggelaar was unstoppable and won in impressive style. Maybe I'll practice some more and do better next year.

1: 11 pts [860] VAN DEN BIGGELAAR Nicky
2: 8 pts [832] KASHIWABARA Takuji
3: 7 pts [822] LEADER Imre
[782] MARCONI Francesco
[755] VAN HEERE Mark
6: 6 pts [794] NICOLET Stephane
[781] AUZENDE Frederic
[775] MORENO Borja
[772] SCHOTTE Tom
10: 5 pts [775] HOBO Roel
[693] AUBROECK Patrick
[684] VAN DEN BERG Erwin
13: 4 pts [658] FRANSEN Martin
[656] SNEEK Marcel
[652] STANZIONE Pierluigi
[614] DE GRAAF Jan C.
[613] PRIDMORE Ben

Nicky won the final against Takuji 2-0, and Francesco beat Imre in the third-place play-off. Congratulations to everyone!