Mind Sports Pentathlon World Championships 2016

This weekend, the XXXI Summer Olympics will conclude in Rio de Janeiro. There is no reason to be sad, however, because at the same time, this Sunday, the XX Mental Sports Olympiad will begin in London. The main event of the Mental Sports Olympiad - the Pentamind World Championships - has been created based on the modern pentathlon, which is on the Summer Olympics schedule, to determine the most versatile (mental) athlete. As has become a tradition in the last couple of years, both the Pentathlon World Championships and the entire Mental Sports Olympiad have been shortened to 8 competition days to accommodate one rest day. The competitions will last from August 21 to 29, with the rest day on August 27. Unfortunately, only remnants remain from the Estonian super team this year, as the world's best junior Martin will not be able to come, and Madli, who has earned a medal in the women's category for the last two years, will only be coming for the final days. What will I have left if I have to bring the medal myself? My program for this year is as follows (sessions run from 10.15am-1.45pm, 2.15pm-6pm and 7pm-10.30pm local time): Day 1: Session 1 and 2 - Settlers of Catan Session 3 - 7 card stud (poker) Day 2: Session 1 and 2 - Cities & Knights Session 3 - London Lowball (poker) Day 3: Session 1 and 2 - rest Session 3 - trench Day 4: Session 1 - rest Session 2 and 3 - entropy Day 5: Session 1 - solving logic and other problems Session 2 - kamisado Session 3 - Omaha (poker) Day 6: Session 1 and 2 - lines of action There is no session 3 on this day Day 7 - official day off 8. Day: Session 1 - Blokus Session 2 - Quoridor Session 3 - Continuo Day 9: Session 1 - Boku Session 2 - Texas Holdem (Poker) Session 3 - Official Awards Ceremony

Those who have read the reviews in previous years will have noticed that the program includes several usual suspects - lines of action, kamisado, entropia, boku - but also a few new entrants like Settlers of Catan, continuo and trench. For the first time in years, I have no plans to play chess. The reason is very simple - the young people with whom I was just a couple of years ago, as if I were equal to equal, have since become grandmasters and in a game with a short time control I have no chance against characters of this caliber. That is why I made the painful but necessary decision and will play Catan instead of chess. It is a bit embarrassing - I have always said that the sun of the Lord will rise before I force myself to play some dice game instead of the classic deterministic full-information areas - but circumstances have forced me to do so. The dice game is planned and the sun of the Lord is shining. The situation is made even more embarrassing by the fact that I am a relative novice at Catan and considering that there are at least 2 of the world's top Catan players among the five competitors, the hope of earning decent points there is slim to none. However, there is no better alternative at this time and you can always fiddle around with the dice game a bit (not to be too harsh on Catan experts, it should be mentioned that it is largely a skill game). Trench is a completely new - based on the rules, it seems quite similar to chess - game, only a year or two old and the Pentamind program was switched on just a few weeks ago. In general, I always do well with such games that everyone sees for the first time, so it was no special feat to force it into my program - although unfortunately at the expense of Hare&Tortoise. Continuo is a game of forming color chains from puzzle pieces. It seems pretty boring, so I hope that smarter people won't bother playing it :P The fourth new area for me (to be perfectly honest, I've participated in it once before) is solving problems in the form of a test. Ten different categories are tested - chess, checkers, go, backgammon, memory, phishing (mental calculation), creative thinking, logic, renju and mastermind - hence the name of the competition, decamentathlon. I've wanted to try it for a long time, but looking at the faces of people coming out of the "exam room" - as if they've had a lobotomy - I've lost my appetite. After participating in the decamentathlon, the next sessions can be written off. As for the old trumps - all of which are relatively niche antagonistic purely skill games - the hopes are at least as high as in previous years (except for entropy, where I have somehow mysteriously lost my creativity), but unfortunately the expected points are lower than before due to the rule change that came into effect last year. Kamisado and Boku may not earn 90 points even if you lose (the exact score depends on the number of participants), which means that in the long term I will have to start considering replacing these games - unfortunately, probably again with some stochastic replacement. It is sad to give up my favorite games, but there is nothing to be done, we have to move with the times. Since there have been quite a few Lines of Action fans in Estonia, I can at least promise them as a consolation that I will not replace this game with any game containing an element of luck before Doomsday Saturday!

There are 2 days left until the tournament and I arrived in London. A day and a half is just the right amount of time to acclimatize - not that the two-hour time difference will have any special effect, but the brain has to be ready to work at full speed even at midnight Estonian time and lately my eyes tend to be closed long before that. London welcomed me with a pleasant surprise when a girl at the hostel reception greeted me ... in Estonian! Or to be precise, she greeted me in English, but when I handed her my ID card, she switched to Estonian. According to statistics, London is one of the favorite destinations for young Estonian migrants and it seems that the statistics don't lie - during my visits to London, this is the third time I've met an Estonian at the hostel reception. So let's hope that everything ends well, what starts well and I'll finish what Kupper left unfinished. Realistically, the medal chances are not bad, the form is certainly much better than last year, although at the same time far from as good as the peak form in 2009-2011. So approximately 50-50. Statistics from previous years show that everything is decided by poker - I have come to the medal 4 times and in those four years I was defeated by poker. So the miraculous formula is simple - all my strength into poker! Just kidding, but even soberly considering it, it is difficult to get the necessary points for a medal - at least 455-460 points - without succeeding in poker. Especially after last year's change in scoring rules, where the absence of a random element is no longer assessed so much as the popularity of the field in the world. This significantly reduces the weight of my cunningly specialized niches, and the relatively sweeter the points at stake in poker are. The most likely path to a medal seems to be something like the following. It is definitely necessary to win lines of action, in addition to getting a clean second place in entropy (relatively optimistic given the current form) and at least second in some poker variant - that should be three 93-95 point results combined and with a little luck a couple of 88-91 point scores would be tolerated, which would be brought by defeats in bokus and kamisado or a share of first place/clean second place in quoridor. The approximately 455-460 points achieved in this way would give good hopes for a medal and for that you don't need to be so self-deprecating. Who among the competitors could surpass this score? Definitely last year's top two, James Heppell and Ankush Khandelwal. Heppell rode through the entire tournament last year like an unstoppable armored train and could have combined his dozen or so super results in a couple of dozen ways to surpass 460 points. Ankush seemed to have one disappointment after another, but he was still in the gold competition until the last day and there was definitely a good margin. If these two supermen do their job, it's hard to see who could challenge them, as they could easily reach the 480-point mark that seems fantastic to the rest of us. The only hope seems to be if they burn out or have rested on their laurels for the rest of the year and lost their form. For everyone else, mere mortals, 460 points should be a tough nut to crack. Last year's bronze medalist David Jameson has been getting stronger every year and given how he has clearly torn the black entropy apart over the past year, there is no reason to doubt that this trend will continue. If it were possible to place bets on this area with bookmakers, David would probably be the main candidate to erase my medal hopes. So, as any exciting sporting event should be - getting a medal is about as likely as not getting one and all that remains is to hope that anything is possible until the last day.

The main thing is that everything went well at the hotel reception, everything else is now just a matter of formalities.

Estonian girls..I'm sure you're also playing dice safely under the deck..

Unfortunately, the good thing only lasted a few hours instead of the expected week and a half. If you look like a tourist (although in my opinion I look like an Eastern European tourist who has nothing to steal), thieves won't be afraid to take inventory of a locked cupboard in a crowded room in broad daylight. It was even a good thing that no documents or phones were wanted. Now we're waiting for the police, so how exciting. At this point, I want to praise the hostel staff, especially the Estonian girl, for their professionalism and willingness to help. Although they are not to blame for anything, I have already been showered with all sorts of privileges (like a safe), not to mention moral support and useful instructions on communicating with the police and elsewhere. So, Madli, I still recommend you come here. Besides, the probability that you will also fall victim to theft is extremely small now. Now let's play Hercule Poirot with Inspector Japp :)

A quick overview by area, where to expect what from where. Then it's good to compare later whether expectations were exceeded or not. Day 1 Catan - there are no expectations and therefore if you manage to earn a decent amount of points, which can be helpful, then it's a pure bonus Poker (7 card stud) - I play 3-4 poker tournaments in total and would like to hope that at least in most of them I manage to finish in the top three and earn at least 90 points. Day 2 Catan (Cities and knights) - see Day 1 Poker (London Lowball) - see Day 1 Day 3 Trench - a completely new game that is 100% determined, which should suit me well. However, the variant tree is more like chess, where the tree gets very wide very quickly and it generally doesn't suit me well (I prefer calculation trees that require long and narrow variants). I will definitely only go out for first place, because everything else in this game doesn't give good points. Day 4 Entropy - one of the old trump cards that I have won 3 times. Since 2011, when I found a rather revolutionary idea that significantly shifted the balance of points and mobility, I have always been among the first, and the competitors have been rather new names who, playing against me repeatedly, have either consciously or unconsciously acquired a similar strategy, while the characters who dominated this game in the last decade have tended to fall behind. However, something has changed this year - either someone has found a new idea that works well against my strategy or I have simply lost much-needed creativity in this game, but I can no longer be considered a guide. I have already lost more games in 2016 than in the previous 3-4 years combined. Therefore, I dare not hope for a defeat, but I still think that three, which can give a result of around 90 points. Day 5 Decamentathlon - the last time I participated there, I was thoroughly destroyed, but I was not prepared for it that time either. There are traditionally few participants in Decamentathlon, around 8-10, and I would hope for a place in the top third. Except for first place, it doesn't give decent points, and hoping for that seems far from optimistic based on historical data, but the temptation to test myself there is too great. Besides, the tests planned this year suit me much better than last time, so who knows, maybe something good will come of it. Kamisado - a semi-mandatory underdog. Unfortunately, a cheap area, from which you can get a maximum of 90 points. Poker (Omaha) - see Day 1 Day 6 Lines of action - my favorite area, where only first place is satisfactory Day 8 Blokus - last year I was among the last, so I don't expect anything. But in the 4-player version, anything can happen Quoridor - this is a dark horse, where I secretly hope to surprise. Last year I finished at 60%, but according to the feeling, I had a lot of bad luck. My gut tells me that this year I will be among the top three. Continuo - I'm participating for the first time and I don't really know how to judge the level of others. However, I'm impressed that almost every year there is a different winner, which suggests that there shouldn't be any experts in this game. I also like the narrow scoring tree. If the card god is in favor, anything can happen, because it's not immediately obvious why I should make any major mistakes in such a primitive game. Day 9 Boku - the same applies as for kamisado: a semi-mandatory win and we have to hope that for some reason there will be a lot of participants this year. Poker (Texas Holdem) - see. Day 1 Considering the overall score, I have a good feeling this year for some reason. The training went perfectly and the form seems to be well-timed. The last few days have felt like the adrenaline is getting stronger and there is that 2011-2012 feeling that now what I've been waiting for for a year is here. As if after a year of hard work, a vacation is finally here. The goal is to realize the form 100% and be in the gold competition until the last day. Whether it ultimately gives you a medal is not so important. The goal is not the medals or the cup, but the knowledge that you can still compete on an equal level with the world's top athletes.

For the sake of excitement, I'll also make a prediction of the medal winners: 1. Ankush, 2. James Heppel, 3. Andres If anyone has a very strong feeling about who will be in the top three, I'll make a big box of ice cream that accurately predicts the medalists :) The list of past world champions may be helpful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Sports_Olympiad#Pentamind

I predict that you will come ahead of Ankush. Since I don't know the other socks there, I can't predict their positions. I'm willing to bet on them at 1:1 odds, but on the condition that you also inform him about our bet! Since I'm not a big fan of ice cream, then a big box of ice cream for you and a beer for me for about the same amount!

Ok, deal. It almost seems like a win-win, either a good place or good ice cream. I'll talk to Ankush first thing in the morning, he's also coming to play Settlers (he's one of the favorites there; and it's a bit of an unpleasant fork for him that Settlers and chess overlap, since he's a top expert in both).