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Chapter 10 - Sunday morning
Maybe I had not had to manoeuvre anybody out the previous evening
because play was due to re-commence at 10.30am on the Sunday
morning. Yee Gads, he's a Devil that Mike he is! Well maybe so,
but players usually like to be away long before the sun it does
set on a Sunday evening so I'm afraid your T.D. is left with
little choice but to get players moving early in the day. I'm sure
the free morning coffee we laid on helped to kick-start those that
might have needed it. At 10.30am we had a good crowd in the house
so I decided to throw in a little extra to add a bit of spice to
the smooth proceedings; A Last 8 Individual Auction. Mr Biddle did
the honours and a further £880 was raised. Championship and
Intermediate Flight matches got themselves underway while I took a
few more registrations for the Combined Last Chance for the first
available 64 players with re-buys.
Hands up, this was a format that I saw Martin Hemming use in his
Cotswold Fireside Tournament in 2007 and I must say I was greatly
impressed by it so I had decided to use it at this event but with
a slight modification. We would play 5 pointers (instead of 7
pointers) but retain the same handicap system that Martin used:
Casual v Casual start at 0-0 to 5
Casual v Intermediate start at 1-0 to 5
Casual v Champion start at 2-0 to 5
Intermediate v Intermediate start at 0-0 to 5
Intermediate v Champion start at 1-0 to 5
Champion v Champion start at 0-0 to 5
In the Cotswolds the last 16 had been 15 Championship players and
1 (strong) Intermediate player so I think the handicap system had
had little or no effect. But I wasn't so sure what it would do if
5 pointers were played. So I tried it out. N.B. This had been
published on the website so everybody should have known about it
and I think did.
What had really astonished everybody in the Cotswolds was how
large the Prize Fund became. There was a £5 or £25 Optional Pool
and the £25er had very nearly hit a grand. Well worth playing for.
31 players were in the initial draw, as players lost in the
Championship and Intermediate Flights they joined the Last Chance,
knocked out players bought back in, when I got down to 20 seats
left I announced this fact in all playing areas, losers from all
brackets joined the Last Chance, a while later I announced 15
seats left, then 10 seat left and finally just 5 seats left and
all seats were taken just before lunch was served. Our Last Chance
Prize Funds had become £95 and £1125. A good number of players
were kind enough to ask me if I wanted to check my computer
programming because they just couldn't believe it could have got
so large. Yup, it was right.
In the Championship Main our Semi-Finalists were:
Uli Koch v George Sulimirski
Julian Fetterlein v Neil Robins
Championship Progressive Consolation players were now:
John Clark, Geoff Oliver, Andy Bell, Simonetta Barone, Marcus
Wrinch, Wayne Felton, Carter Mattig, Ian Tarr, Jon Barnes, Sean
Williams, Barry McAdam, Chris Ternel, Roland Herrera and Lawrence
Powell.
In the Intermediate Main Final John Wright would play Graham Read
while in the Consolation we had Monica Beckerson, John Plummer,
Alex Polden and Sue Keeble. |