| |
BGonline.org Forums
Who Is Mary Hickey?
Posted By: Paul Weaver
Date: Thursday, 20 January 2011, at 10:36 p.m.
Mary Hickey is a sweetheart. I love her. Mary is a smiling, special, soft-spoken, sweetheart superstar. The backgammon scene and the world are much better places with this lovely lady around.
Congratulations to Mary, who has set a world record by winning three ABT events (all organized by Chiva) within the last eight months. She also won the Ohio Championships in 2009. More details of her extensive tournament successes will be given at the conclusion of this post.
Giant slayer Mary Hickey won the tournament last weekend in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Her opponents were Scott Casty, Ian MacFarlane, Victor Ashkenazy, Ray Fogerlund, Mario Sequeira, and Mike Corbett. Her last three opponents are members of the Giant-64 list.
I can personally testify that Mary is an outstanding player. A very intelligent lady, she majored in chemical engineering at WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute). Soon after she began playing backgammon in the 1970s, she started rolling out positions by hand with a live cube and her own method of variance reduction. Mary took a hiatus from backgammon, 1985 to 1995, when her children were young. She has a son who is 29 and a lawyer and a daughter who is 27 and a teacher. Returning to active play roughly 15 years ago, Mary has made remarkable progress in improving her game.
Mary has written many great articles for the outstanding newsletter Chicago Point. She is also a regular contributor to GammonVillage, writing tournament reports. She has written three non-backgammon books, and is currently finishing her second backgammon book which she is coauthoring with Marty Storer. "What's Your Game Plan? Backgammon Strategy in the Middle Game" is scheduled for publication later this year.
Mary has about half a dozen backgammon students at any one time. Her teaching profile can be seen on GammonVillage.
Mary gave me her permission to state that she is 55 years old. I asked her if she had been rolling double 5s more frequently since she turned 55 and she responded by telling me that was a stupid question.
Here is what Mary wrote about her CD book:
"My book on CD, Chouette and More: The World's First and Only Backgammon Sci-fi Soap Opera, is now available at the GammonVillage store and at Carol Joy Cole's "backgammon boutique". It is a compilation of my 44-column series on chouette, but also backgammon in general, published at GammonVillage, plus three essays I wrote about the qualities of a winner, the benefits of backgammon, and its psychological traps.
"To read this book on CD, you need a computer but don't have to be connected to the Internet. The chapters appear as Web pages, so unlike other books, it has diagrams in full color and in the later chapters where I used Snowie, the results are complete rather than summarized. It opens automatically when you put it in your CD/DVD drive, and you just click on the option to go to the Welcome Page, click from there to the contents, then click the link to whatever chapter you want to read. It also has Forward and Previous links at the beginning and end of each chapter.
"In the first few chapters of the book, I present some basic principles for chouette, and then in Chapter 11 the soap opera part begins, with you as part of the ongoing story. Sometimes you play with millionaires in the mansion of a cast-off heir of an industrial robber baron, and other times at a coffee shop where quite a few of the players are fish. You visit the scary slum where an ever-nameless good player lives because he's trying to make a living from the game, with the usual result. Another time, you get set up to play against a fearsome Dane named Lars Balrog. For a couple of chapters, you deal with an obnoxious accountant everyone hates to lose to--so much that they sabotage themselves, and proceed to lose to him all the time!
"The "sci-fi" part of the story happens when you fall into a time warp back to the 1970s, and play backgammon there knowing what you know about the game today."
The tournament record of this special smiling superstar over the last dozen years is truly impressive.
Mary was player of the year in the Ohio State BG Club 1997 – 2004 and player of the year in Greater Columbus 2005. She won the Last Chance in The Mid-Atlantic Championships in October 2009. She won the consolation in the Ohio State championships in 2006. She won first place in the Ohio Masters event three times, in 2002, 2003 and 2006. She won the Indy 300 Masters in 2006. Mary won a blitz event in Los Angeles in December 2010 and another blitz in Las Vegas in November 2006.
Additionally, Mary has finished in second place in the following seven events: Michigan Summer Championships in 2002, Ohio State Championships in 2004, Michigan Summer Championships in 2008, Wisconsin State Championships 2009, Consolation in Illinois State Championships in October 2010, Consolation in Mid-Atlantic Championships in October 2008 and Consolation in Michigan Summer Championships (Open) 2005.
Mary has also cashed ten times in doubles events. She won these five doubles events: She won in Las Vegas with Tara Mendicino in November 2010, won in the Illinois State Championships with Adam Bennett in October 2010, won in the Florida State Championships with David Dennis in October 2010, won in New Jesery with Claude Landry in January 2008, and she also won another doubles event with Jon Stephens, perhaps in 1998. Additionally, she has been second in doubles in Los Angeles with Alan Grunwald in December 2010, second in pre-tournament doubles in New Mexico State Championships with Bob Koca in Jan 2010, second place finish in PGH doubles with Jan Carlstrom possibly in 2000. She also reached the semifinals with Rob Maier in Chicago in March 2009 and reached the semifinals of in Michigan with Claude Landry 2008.
Eighteen years ago in Pittsburgh, I won the doubles event with Walter, but the 7pt finals took four hours. I immediately swore to never play in another doubles event, but if I could have Mary as my partner, I would reconsider. I am asking Mary to be my doubles partner in every single tournament she attends for the next twenty years.
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.