The World Team Championship is held every year, with the World Federation (WBGF) inviting bids from member nations to host the event.
In 2021 it was held in Trier, Germany, where the UK team were runners up, in 2022 in Venice where we finished third and in 2023 in Skopje where we were quarter finalists. Expectations were very high for the 2024 event in Stockholm.
UK captain Chris Rogers assembled a very strong team. Joining him were Sebastian Wilkinson, Aref Alipour, Gaz Owen, Raj Jansari, Oliver Squire, Reece Hodges, Pete Heskett and Tim Cross.
The format of the event was “World Cup format”, with the 23 competing nations placed in groups and the top teams going forward to the knock-out stage. Each nation was permitted to bring a squad of nine players of whom five could play in any given match.
Despite our impressive lineup, we got off to a disastrous start losing 2-3 in the first round to Belgium followed by a 1-4 thrashing against Finland. It was very much looking like an early bath for our star players with merciless headlines in the national press no doubt baying for the blood of the captain and UKBGF board.
There followed an impressive turnaround with the team grinding out 3-2 wins against Ukraine and Cyprus, giving us a slim chance to progress. The bookmakers probably would have offered long odds as we were due to face a formidable Japanese team comprising the world’s top players, including Mochy and Michy. Only a few years ago it would have been considered a shock result to beat Japan by any margin. With the aid of Chris’s encouraging WhatsApp messages and innumerable pep talks, the unthinkable happened. A 5-0 win for the UK and progress towards a playoff round for the Last 8.
As we all know, backgammon is a great leveller. We were edged out 2-3 by Italy in the playoff round however the memory of a whitewash over Japan will last for a very long time. It should be emphasized this was no fluke result as UK players beat the Japanese players on PR in three of the five matches whilst the overall PRs were 3.19 for UK and 3.57 for Japan. After defeating us, Italy went on to reach the final where they were beaten by Austria who were crowned 2024 world champions. Congratulations to their team.
Chris Rogers said: “As the UK captain I was very proud of the way the UK Team performed. The dice gods did not favour us in the earlier rounds, but in the face of adversity we performed admirably against Japan to progress in the tournament. Despite the final result, I could not be more proud of our team.”
While this was all going on, for the first time there was a separate team event for the women. Our women players excelled in reaching the final (see below). I cannot possibly do justice to their achievement.
After the team event was over, several of our players stayed on for the Swedish Open. Reece Hodges achieved an outstanding third place in the Masters event (he was third in the Last Chance of the individual event in Skopje last year) and Oliver Squire won yet another Super Jackpot, with Raj Jansari reaching the semi-final of this and the Speed Gammon. Radu Ciortan was runner up in another Super Jackpot. Sebastian Wilkinson won the Consulting Doubles event with his Ukrainian partner Yurii Vatsyk. Merrin Rose provided commentary for which she rightly received a Special Player award. The Swedish Open Champion for 2024 is Dutchman, Peter van Rooij.
There was a little time for tourism. Stockholm is a city I have visited many times and have come to like as it is about one third built up, one third woodland and one third water. There are several interesting museums including the Vasa which features a ship that sank in the 17th century shortly after leaving the harbour, was salvaged almost fully intact and placed on display. One of the items rescued and exhibited in the museum is a backgammon board as the game was popular among sailors on voyages. Here is Oliver Squire inviting passersby to the inevitable chouette.
Next year the event is to be held in Loutraki, Greece. The UK is among the nations competing to host the event in 2026. This could very well be the most prestigious and best attended event held in the UK, so we all eagerly await the announcement due to be made by the WBGF in October.
Finally, here is an interesting position from Sebastian Wilkinson’s match against Mochy for the UK v Japan. Mochy made the double tiger play of 8/4*, 6/3*. It is certainly not a blunder to make this play. It achieves more gammons on a rollout and may prevent Sebastian from anchoring. A better play is 14/11, 9/5 making it likely that Mochy will either make the bar point or an inner board point if Sebastian fails to anchor. Mochy has a significant racing lead and as they say, “when you have a racing lead, race.” Besides, getting hit sets Mochy back which is what happened in the game. In fact, Mochy danced and was in real trouble from that point. This is a situation where priming plays, quietly bringing the position home, are superior to blitzing.
Women’s Team Reach Final:
Julia Hayward adds:
The Women’s Teams event was an innovation in 2024, and arose in part out of our second Genud Cup defeat to the USA in 2022 and the subsequent formation of the US-based Women’s World of Backgammon group to get more women into the higher levels of the game. Having not had many online successes as a team during the Covid era, expectations were perhaps limited, but the team – myself, Anna Price, Rachel Rhodes, Anna Parker, Merrin Rose and Becca Bell – were determined to enjoy the adventure regardless of the result. But first – we eschewed the usual polo shirts to go equipped with unique, beautiful scarves designed by Rowena Paliwoda, which drew a lot of attention from the other teams!
I’d also set out to make sure we all got plenty of games by rotating everyone regularly and with eight teams competing, the initial phase was a round robin over two days. First up, a very strong Denmark team and three intense matches, which all went our way, and we found ourselves unexpectedly topping the table as all other matches finished 2-1. This was followed by two more 3-0 wins against Georgia and Germany; then late into the night Anna made it ten back to back wins in the first leg against the USA. The other two boards were hard fought but didn’t go our way, but after day 1 we were clear leaders.
Day two, and wins against Sweden and France followed – the French match having a little confusion at the end as they hadn’t sat in the correct places, but our wins stood – and the final round was a 2-1 loss to Norway, but by that point it was a dead rubber for us. There was then a long wait to see who the final four would be, importantly for me as the reward for being #1 was being able to choose our semi-final opponents from the last four. Late on a hot afternoon, with the team crowded around a number of boards waving scores to each other, we realised there had been a major upset – the three Georgian women (who had to play every match, no rest!) beating the USA to grab fourth place. We picked them to meet on the Wednesday morning.
Day three and semi-final – I couldn’t put a foot wrong with my dice and wrapped up a thirteen-pointer in little more than half an hour – by contrast, the remaining matches were slow and a bit fractious with the Georgians unhappy with the spectators, not helped by the language barrier. We ended up 2-1 winners, so on to the final with the USA, delayed by an hour because of the length of the semi-finals… but by this time we’d missed our slot on the stream, which would have to switch over to the open final after an hour. During the wait, Merrin had found herself invited into the commentary box – a new talent discovered! Meanwhile, my informal offer of playing 5v5 for the final had been roundly rejected, a hedge agreed and I was agonising about who to throw into the deep end.
The USA had shuffled their team so we had different pairings from the first time, and rather than the quiet of the stream room we were positioned right in the middle of the hall where a large crowd gathered around us. Things started briskly but my dice abandoned me completely at 5-0 up against Irina Litzenberger and soon I found myself losing 5-14 Crawford, too much of a mountain to climb and relegated to watching the others. Rachel’s match against Karen Davis was much closer but also slipped away; and after a marathon against Leyla Zaloutskaya, Merrin earned us a consolation point.
The 3rd/4th place match was still running at this point, and soon we were celebrating another win from Georgia, over Norway – they were clearly overwhelmed by the emotion of it all and hugging everyone in sight. And before we’d even made it to dinner, the result had reached Tblisi and a phone video of the end of the final was being broadcast on state television news…
Obviously we were gutted to lose at the very end, but we have a lot to be proud of – 18 wins from 27 was clearly the best team performance, everyone played their best game and everyone shared in the wins. And we’ve inspired more countries to get involved in Loutraki in 2025. In the meantime, we’ll be back brushing up for the third Genud Cup later this year, a chance to put our inability to beat the US to rest!
An excellent report, many thanks.
UK Backgammon seems to be going from strength to strength.