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Archives for June 2017

Another new Award: Most Improved Player

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Many thanks to all who have been busy nominating your favourites for the British Backgammon Awards. Some interesting choices and some very popular names… keep them coming in!

There is one new award which we are not taking nominations for, and that’s Most Improved Player of the Year. Instead, we’ll be going through the UKBGF Ratings seeing who has made the most progress over the year from 1st July 2016 to the end of 30th June – tomorrow. At the moment there are a lot of players clustered around the 1400-1600 range who haven’t got a long history in the system, so we don’t anticipate that the winners will split out well into divisions of beginners, intermediates and advanced players as originally envisaged, but we’ll review what happens this year after the event – this is only a starting point! We’re really grateful to Darren Woodcock for setting the idea in motion and to everyone who’s supported it; we hope when the numbers have been crunched that we have some clearly worthy winners!

If your club or organisation doesn’t yet submit results into the ratings system – it’s not an onerous task and we hope to make it as easy as we can. Every game recorded helps the ratings as comprehensive and accurate as possible. Just get in touch with us

St Albans Open: Six of the Best…

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The end of April saw the second St Albans Open. 64 players with the format of Round-Robin on Saturday, knockout on Sunday. St Albans used a seeding system again based on the UKBGF ratings and three 11 pointers on Saturday split the players into a Main and a Consolation. Nicky Check was the winner and the final against Tariq Siddiqi was videoed and analysed. What follows is not a full write up of the match (which can be viewed here) but a small selection of positions is given below.

It was nice to see a final where there was an insignificant luck element (according to XG). Neither player played as well as they would have liked, but in their defence it followed a hard two days of backgammon with little respite.

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Nominations Open for British Backgammon Awards 2017

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Nominations are now open for the British Backgammon Awards 2017

The UK Open is not far away now, and once again we are looking for the select few who have gone that extra mile for the backgammon world in the last year – well, strictly the time since the Awards were last held at the UK Open in May 2016. And we are looking to you, our members, to tell us who you think they are! Obviously we have featured some high-profile tournament winners and the international teams on the website before, but just as important for the health of the game are the tournament directors, the club organisers, the numerous helpers behind the scenes, and the players who may never even have won a trophy but whose presence makes an evening session a highly enjoyable experience.

At the 2016 Awards – the UK International Online Team

 

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Review: The Blackpool Imperial Cup 2017

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First of all, a big thank you to the 102 players who attended the Blackpool Imperial Cup this weekend helping to make it such a successful event. We are proud to be able to say it is now the biggest single flight tournament in the UK, with players from Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Ireland and Singapore making the journey to join us.

 

Finalist Daniel Molan and winner Frank Fleming (photos: Martin Barkwill)

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Calling all students – International Collegiate Backgammon

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Masayuki “Mochy” Mochizuki (Japan) and Phil Simborg (US) have been running camps and lessons and programs for schoolchildren and students in their own countries for a number of years, and decided that there is no reason why the rest of the world can’t do the same. So they have created the International Collegiate Backgammon Championships to provide a place where students under the age of 26 can compete for scholarships and prizes.

Through the generosity of many in the backgammon community, over $10,000 in scholarship funds and dozens of prizes including books, software, lessons and backgammon supplies have been donated to support the program.

Safe Harbor Games and BackgammonAce have donated the use of their sites and apps to host tournaments. By the summer of 2018 they will run special qualifying events to get to 2 finalists which will be invited to play a live, final match at a major tournament. All expenses will be paid and there will be major prizes awarded.

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