Hi folks,

 

Back in January, we started the 4th Annual Winter Blitz, and now 7 months later we have our finals!  It sure came down to the wire, with the winner of the tournament decided by our longest game dc376 - which went a grueling 18 years and ended in a 6-way draw.  6 of the starting players made it clear to the end after 35 turns!

 

But what this means for our tournament, is that our championship goes squarely to Dave Kleiman, a newcomer to Diplomaticcorp who scored a 3-Way Draw as Germany in round 1 (dc360) and a Solo as France in round 2 (dc37.

 

Congratulations!!

 

Dave is the only player to score over 30 points with a total of 34.4 - nearly 5 points ahead of the pack.  Dave takes home the $150 gift certificate to thoughthammer.com, and will receive an invitation to the 2011 DC Invitational where he will sit at a table with Adam Martin-Schwarze (two-time DCI champion) and a host of other diplomatic greats.

 

Best Round 1 and Best Round 2 are both decided by tiebreaks…

 

Round 1 saw two Solo victories - by Jean-Luc Granier and Matthew ODonnell.  Tie-breaks are determined by adding up the final tournament score of their opponents in the game to determine who played the theoretical tougher competition.  Jean-Luc's opponents scored a total of 34.4 while Matthew's scored 45.9, which determines our Best Round 1 player (and recipient of the thoughthammer gift certificate) to be Matthew ODonnel!  Matthew is another new player to DC who sets some high expectations with a first-game solo.

 

Round 2 saw three Solo victories - one by our champion Dave (excluded from consideration for Best Round 2) as well as Jeremy Waters (tiebreak 29.6) and Chris "Dancing Queen" Martin (tiebreak 4.  Chris makes this a clean sweep for the newbies, as all three winners of the 2011 Winter Blitz were players who had never before played a game here!  Our regulars obviously have a thing or two to learn yet...

 

Now on logistic matters, we have to take a moment to look back on this as the first time we've ever put on a tournament with a whopping 10 boards full of eager blitzey players!  That was an incredible accomplishment, and certainly only doable thru the help from our completely volunteer GM team - with Christine, Cory, John, Fredrik, and Darryl returning from the WB 2010, plus Chris, Vegas, Hamish, and Brian joining us this year... then we round out our team w your esteemed moderator and Lord of the March, Garry.  A huge thank you to all of you for helping out.  The challenge of running these games is no secret - with two major deadlines per week at the same time every day it's no light task, especially with several of the round 1 games overlapping round 2.

 

** If you would like to help put on a future WB tournament or run a regular season game, please inquire **

 

Some points of interest, this year our best performing countries were France and Turkey, with average scores of 9.4 and 8.7.  The worst performing was Austria with an average score of 3.9.  Full stats are online:  www.diplomaticcorp.com/winterblitz

 

I want to wholeheartedly thank thoughthammer.com since for the first time we have a sponser for our tournament, which seems to get better every year.  If you haven't already, be sure to visit them for all your board game needs - I think they have every game out there, great prices, and free shipping over $100 - what more could you ask for?

 

We will circulate a survey, tho feel free to share general comments and suggestions as you see fit.  We strive to improve the experience every year and are learning more with each event.  On behalf of Garry and our GM team, I’d like to thank you once again for coming out… please do provide suggestions for next year.

 

There are several new games recruiting at the moment… see www.diplomaticcorp.com/recruiting.  There’s the usual Standard, plus a Shift Right, a Viking Gunboat, and a Haven World all open to join!

 

Enjoy,

-mike

 

WB 2011 Co-TD

www.diplomaticcorp.com