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Records are made to be broken !! Congrats Ray !!

Posted By: Rich Munitz
Date: Wednesday, 6 July 2011, at 5:41 a.m.

In Response To: Records are made to be broken !! Congrats Ray !! (Stick)

Stick asks very reasonable questions. Everything must be judged in the entirety of information, and the year is not even close to being over yet.

First of all, I have enormous respect for Ray's game and his competitive spirit, mental toughness, innate talent, resourcefulness, ability to read opponents, etc. Ray is a deserving Giant of Backgammon in my book. I like to think of myself as the same kind of player. I have said before that there is more to winning tournament backgammon than making bot plays and I stand by that.

That said, Ray is a great player who also happens to be hot as hell right now. Winning matches from 0.6% match equity kind of hot. You don't win this much without playing well and also rolling well. Average players are not going to do it and poor rollers are not going to do it. It takes both together conspiring against the field since the dice cannot always be on full thrusters and great players will make blunders.

Let's see where this goes before jumping to any conclusions. The year is still young.

I know a thing or two about this phenomena. Back in 2006, I was on a similar hot streak. I had played only 5 events through early September. I had won 3 of them and cashed in a 4th and had amassed about 55 ABT points. Many of the same questions were raised at that time, except there were fewer answers since I had no prior track record as far as anyone could recall. Fact is that I got extraordinarily lucky on top of strong play to do what I did there. Then I floated back to earth and played 5 more events that year only achieving a minor cash in the final one.

Ray has every reason to be as proud of his achievement as I was of mine. But I am sure he knows just as well as I do that it is an aberration. Neither of us are that good without help from the dice gods.

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