BMS(UK) RANKING TOURNAMENT #5: FINAL REPORT
Castle Donington, 24-25 October 2015
As previously reported on the UKBGF facebook page, eighteen players participated in the fifth Backgammon Masters Series (UK) Ranking tournaments held this year and kindly sponsored by Paul Plumptre. This was the first BMS tournament for six of the players – Michel Lamote from Belgium, Brendan Burgess from Ireland, and David Brown, Yan Kit Chan, Tim Line and Anna Price from the UK. The tournament and its 54 matches ran very smoothly in the very pleasant playing environment provided by the conference rooms of the East Midlands Holiday Inn Hotel.
The winner, with a clean sheet of six wins, was Dale Taylor. Tim Cross and Sebastian Wilkinson both finished on five wins and Tim won the tie-breaker to take second place. Certificates were presented to Dale and Tim. Julian Fetterlein was also presented with a certificate for achieving the astonishing average PR of 3.01 over his six matches at the August BMS event. The full round-by round scores are shown in the Leaderboard given below.
(The photograph shows from left to right Paul Plumptre, Sebastian Wilkinson, Dale Tatlor and Tim Cross)
In the two weeks since the tournament, the match recordings from the tournament have been transcribed, analysed in detail and moderated, by a very efficient and dedicated team including Michael Roumeliotis, Jon Barnes, Julian Fetterlein, Sebastian Wilkinson, Alastair Woods, Michel Lamote, Bernhard Mayr, Dmitriy Obukhov and Mark Adkins. Unfortunately one of the 54 matches could not be transcribed due to a technical mishap. However, this was not critical to the PR results.
Amazingly, Julian Fetterlein and Sebastian Wilkinson both achieved the best PR score of 4.25, to share the PR-Prize for the tournament. With these results Julian inches every closer to being awarded the title of Grandmaster, and Sebastian achieves the title of Master (Class 1). Tim Cross, the appointed Captain of the UKBGF National Live and Online Teams also achieved an excellent PR of 4.44, which improves his aggregate PR score to 4.87, moving closer to the Master (Class 1) level.
Other notable performances included those by Paul Plumptre and Alastair Woods, who both made very significant improvements to their aggregate PRs. Paul achieves an upgrade to Advanced (Class 1) bordering on the Master class grades, and Alastair achieved a provisional Master (Class 2) grading. Mark Dixon and Ian Hesketh also achieved upgrades to Advanced (Class 2) and Advanced (Class 3) respectively. The full results are shown in the Tournament PR and Grading Report given below. Congratulations to the exemplary achievers and to all participants for helping to create an environment where quality can thrive.
The five BMS Ranking tournaments held in the UK so far this year have provided a wealth of useful data which is summarised below in the BMAB UK and UK Residents Ranking Table, where the current top 20 performers are shown. There are a few notable UK players not included on the list who have not attended a BMS (UK) Ranking tournaments so far, but there are strong indications that many of these will participate in the next few months.
