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BGonline.org Forums
Match with Berj
Posted By: Nack Ballard In Response To: A 1980 Tournament at Lake Tahoe STARTED at 1:30 am!!! (Joe Russell)
Date: Friday, 1 October 2010, at 7:04 p.m.
Yes, it was Berj Abadjian. This semis match was to 19 points. [The quarter-finals vs Kit (I think) was 17 or 19, and the (eigthth-round) finals with Sandy was 21.] I have no memory of the starting and finishing times, though I thought it finished later than 5:30 a.m. I later heard rumors of duration up to 10.5 hours, but I suspect that Jake's memory of 8 is closer to the truth.
I had practiced transcendental meditation for six years (from the age of 18) and had used it to advantage in the multiple-day chouettes at Chuck Papazian's house in Walnut Creek (CA). I developed a technique for dozing/trancing between moves that worked especially well versus slow opps (opponents).
After Opp rolled, I'd look at the dice, and doze until I heard the sound of those dice hit the bottom of Opp's cup. Yet I never lost awareness of the position. I could also do this while watching (thereby guarding my cube equity), while other good players in the game lost equity napping or playing tired.
This technique came in handy playing Berj (who had tortured all his opps prior to the semis). In the first few moves of our opening game, he shuffled checkers ad nauseum, including many ridiculous moves he never intended to play. He also shook his cup up and down endlessly at a butter-churning pace. (A spectator later told me that about mid-match he lost count at 120 shakes at least a couple of times before Berj rolled.)
Around the middle of the first game, I started trancing but with a two-stage adaptation. I dozed off when he started shaking and awoke when his dice hit the table, looked at the roll, and dozed again until the dice hit the bottom of his cup. (I seem to recall that WGR -- who was transcribing -- said I caught all of Berj's illegal moves.)
It was hard for Berj (or anyone else) to tell I was dozing/trancing because my eyelids weren't always completely shut (not by design, that's just the way it was), and who can become alert on queue anyway? It must have greatly frustrated Berj, but in truth it never entered my mind to do so; I was just defending myself. There's almost nothing more agonizing to me than slow backgammon.
People asked me later why I didn't complain to the tournament committee, as supposedly was my right. I may have answered something like "I didn't want to give him the satisfaction." But in fact it may never have occurred to me. It was pretty much business as usual, and I was getting sufficient rest. As for anything else happening other than a string of backgammon moves, I was oblivious.
Nack
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