Over 120 keen backgammoners descended on Coventry’s Ricoh Arena this weekend for the UK Open – and it certainly didn’t disappoint for the sheer amount of high quality play! Boards were set out ready, along with UKBGF T-shirts, cubes, pens, scorepads, and jelly-sweets for emergency sustenance, and players started congregating mid-afternoon for ad-hoc jackpots and the £1/£5 one-pointer knockouts, while a superb board from Geoffrey Parker was set up with cameras ready to become the featured board – with lucky participants to be selected to play with the world watching…
By 8pm we had fifty for the Friday Warm Up tournament, while another twenty were up for the bigger rewards in the £250 Super Jackpot. The draw for the Super Jackpot threw up two superb featured matches to start off the live streaming, first Julian Fetterlein v Eric McAlpine, and then Eric v Jon Barnes – and a sight never to be seen again, Jon losing on time at 9-7 up… Adam Taylor beat Bek Barbaros to take the Warm Up trophy, while Malcolm Robertson and Sebastian Wilkinson still have the final to play – we simply couldn’t fit it in!
The principal event, the UK Open itself, started off on Saturday morning with 80 in the Masters division and 38 Advanced. With such a large field and double-elimination leading to a long Fighters bracket it took a very slick organising team to keep things to time; someone losing in the first round of the main would face 7 rounds in the Fighters before going to bed – but remarkably only one game was held over to the next morning. At this point David Pritchard, Tim Line, Robin Swaffield and Alex Hodge were our last four undefeated and the last four Fighters standing were Andreas Christian Olsen, James Newman, Yan Kit Chan and Paul Plumptre – with Robin and Alex selected to start off Sunday’s broadcast. In parallel was the rather more relaxed Social Swiss tournament, won by David Broomfield who emerged with a clean sheet.
No time to rest, though, as the consulting doubles – sixteen pairs – and SpeedGammon got started as soon as people were free. The SpeedGammon was run as eight separate jackpots, each feeding a winner into a final bracket of 8…
The early risers on Sunday were treated to a superb seminar by Julian Fetterlein, and then the Arena Cup kicked off with all the players not still in the Open itself. Progress was steady throughout the day with a lot of games to get through, and by 4pm we were ready for the big one – the Open Masters final. David Pritchard was still undefeated while Yan Kit Chan (last year’s Advanced winner) had come a long way through the Fighters bracket. It looked like being a swift affair as David landed a big 4-cube to take an 8-1 lead up to 11, but Yan took his break and came back refreshed, chipping away the deficit very tenaciously in ones and twos to first level the game, then go on to win 11-9 to set up the second match. By this point we had a large crowd gathered in the room, and quite a lot remotely in the online chatroom as well. After a brief break the 5-point decider began, again David running up an early 4-1 lead. Yan saved the Crawford game, but the dice weren’t going to let him come back twice, David finishing 5-2 winner and taking the crown.
UK Open 2015:
- Champion: David Pritchard
- Runner-up: Yan Kit Chan
- 3rd: Alex Hodge
UK Open Advanced 2015
- Winner: Bob Young
- Runner-up: Lewis Potter
Consulting Doubles
- Winners: Simon Morecroft & Sue Keeble
- Runners-up: Rune Faervag & Peter Christmas
Arena Cup: Masters
- Winner: Julian Fetterlein
- Runner-up: Sebastian Wilkinson
Arena Cup: Advanced
- Winner: Mike Murton
- Runner-up: Graham Cornish
Social Swiss
- Saturday winner: David Broomfield
- Sunday winner: David Broomfield (again!)
We certainly had a full day’s play as the final wrapped up at around 7.30; the side events finished off as fast as they could with the SpeedGammon last to finish at gone 9pm. Very well done to everyone who kept going to the end! We hope you had a very enjoyable tournament and hope to see you in 2016.
All the featured matches are available on our YouTube channel, and all the results for all the events are available at Challonge.
For photo albums of the UK Open and British Backgammon Awards see our Flickr account.
Finally, there are plenty of thankyous: to Raj and Peter for directing and keeping everything running smoothly, ably assisted by Hollie Lee, Andrew Pinkus and Ros Nathan who all gave up their weekends for us; Geoffrey Parker for providing prizes; Aref Alipour for running the streaming; Lawrence Powell for photographs; Julian Fetterlein for an excellent seminar, and many others who have helped out behind the scenes. And most of all to all the players who support the Open come good dice or bad…
Have any of the photos that Lawrence took been published ?
Photos from the UK Open will be available on Flickr soon….
Happy they were found for you Bob …Peter went to a lot of effort to find them …all those boards
Thank you Peter
….and here are the UK Open pics: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ukbgf/albums
Thanks to the UK Open organising team for their hard work and for a brilliant weekend. Unfortunately I misplaced my set of see-through balanced precision dice on the Sunday, the colours of which are red and blue. If anyone knows where they are and can return them to their rightful owner I would be grateful. Like the Harry Potter wand, the dice chose me, not the other way round. Therefore they will only perform perfectly for their chosen owner. Method of return could be by owl, invisibility cloak or simple muggle-based means. Many thanks for reading this, and please keep the dice warm til I am re-united with them…….bob y.
Did those dice ever turn up Bob ?
Peter B kindly went through all the packed-away boards, and found them there. I’m about 99.5% certain those he sent me are mine, but if someone else suffered the same situation, and theirs were also those colours and characteristics I described to Peter, I would happily pass them on to them. Thanks for the following up of my minor inconvenience. :-).
The UKBGF Open was very well run, with Peter, Raj and their staff team working exceptionally well. Exactly the right balance between relaxed informality and firm directorship when required. Many thanks to all the organisers.
The Ricoh Stadium is a large venue, with interesting, unusual pitch view hotel rooms (the stadium’s corporate boxes are converted into rooms) and a large casino underneath, though the hotel made some major balls-ups with some participants’ room reservations, which the hotel didn’t handle very well.
I enjoyed watching the livestream – excellent job! You are better on this than the Americans :-). I really hope to make it next year given what a great time I had in 2014. Especially exciting was Yan’s valiant effort from 1-8/11 down. Congrats Dave Pritchard!
Great tournament
A big thank you to all the organisers for the time and effort put in not just this weekend but for the many months planning and preparation.
John 🙂
I second that. You guys must be exhausted!