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BGonline.org Forums
Cleveland ABT Recap
Posted By: Stick
Date: Thursday, 24 March 2016, at 10:35 p.m.
My 3rd of essentially 3 possible ABT events this year. Record attendance for this event! I think the previous all time high was 34 in the Open and I don't know how many overall. This year we had a thundering 38 in the Open, 43 in the Advanced, and 12 in the Novice! Maybe it means backgammon is slightly growing, maybe it means people like the OS tournament, maybe it's variance, who knows but let's hope it's one of the former.
For me personally, it's an ideal tournament. I can drive there easily in under 2 hours. The drive itself is a straight shot, one highway and boom, I'm there. I don't need to come a day early for any events or to adjust to the time change or get settled in to a hotel. I don't need to stay an extra night so I don't have to rush out on Sunday etc...So Friday afternoon I drove up so that I could play in the Ohio Masters. I was hoping to also play doubles but with start times of 7 and 7:30 you were only allowed to enter one of the two so of course Masters event took precedence.
I won my first two matches, field of 16, and when reporting asked if I was good for the night. This was around 11. It was clear I wanted to be done because Jill came with up with me for a day again (where were you Ray?!) and the bar was still open. I was told I was fine so off I went. I checked in about an hour later just to see who else might have shuffled in or if anything was going on and I was told at that time they wanted me to play that round that night!? We worked it out so that we'd play (myself + David Todd) in the morning and have that round completed before the main tournament started. No big deal but don't give me a hard time if a staff member tells me it's ok for me to be done for the night and then an hour later you tell me you want to play a round after I've been drinking and I act pissy. It's because...I'm pissy. I did nothing wrong and was being made to feel bad or potentially penalized for it.
Saturday rolls around and I need to be in the room at 9am to help with Phil's lecture which you've all seen at this point as he posted it on the forums. That went off without a hitch. It seemed like people enjoyed it. Immediately after that (10:30am) I went out and had my match with DT. DT and I are both relatively quick players and we finished our 11pt match before the calcutta had even got to the Open division. There was no time worry where we were concerned.
Ohio is one of the ABT events that isn't clock preference. It seems to work ok because of the somewhat small field and not an overwhelming amount of events. Also not allowing people to enter the doubles and Masters for example helps keep things on time. I'm not sure if anything was clocked. I know I didn't use one in almost all my matches. I'm always pro clock and I think all of my opponents agreed to legal moves in my matches. As far as I know there was no hold up in the tournament though come Sunday I was no longer paying attention to the main event. I had lost, lost, lost and had no vested interest. I got lucky that all my wins came in one event. You can attend an ABT event, go 4-3 and walk away poorer or you can cram all your wins into one event and go away richer. One of the many faces of luck.
Saturday night after I'd essentially crashed out of the main in a quick fashion as I'm known to this year, (I must not know how to win) I joined Phil and a few other people to try a place Phil goes to apparently every year that he said is really good. It's called Johnny's Bar or just Johnny's and is a quaint little Italian joint. While I didn't get the fancy food like frog legs or foie gras (others did), the food was really good and I'd recommend it to anyone who might go to this tourney in the future. It's less than 10 minutes away, a straight shot on 71N.
Not much to report later that night. Ben showed me how to play pool at one point and then since Dion was still alive in the main we decided to play our Masters Final match. He rolled decent, except in races, but I rolled exponentially better. My dice crushed his dice as is often the case and I skated to an 11-2 win. I took lots of pictures over the weekend of which I might post some later on. I also discussed quite a few positions with John O'Hagan and David Rockwell. Always a good learning experience because in doing so you're much more likely to remember the information.
Technically I could have left Saturday late Saturday night but they didn't have the money ready and wanted trophy pictures. The room was also paid for and it was kind of late so no big deal to sleep there and sleep in and wake up and get paid. One of the most disappointing things was the damn hot tub was broken! Nothing I hate more than a hotel that advertises a hot tub and then I get there and the thing doesn't work. I think it may have worked Friday night but when I tried to go Saturday post dinner with all my time to kill it was closed down. Sad panda.
As already noted elsewhere, there wasn't a lot of streaming or recording at the tournament. I think only people who did it personally like Ben or Dmitriy made that happen. I can't think of any drama or incidents from this tourney. Overall a good tourney. Any questions about something I may have left out feel free to ask. This feels way too short.
Stick
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