World Mindset Championship 2011

Lines of action is halfway through and I'm currently sharing the lead with Tim Hebbes. We'll meet in the next round and given my "luck" so far, it's obvious that I'm with white (in lines of action, black starts and has a certain advantage, about the same as white in chess). I just finished a thriller game with former world champion Alain Dekker, which I finally managed to win after several anxious moments. Since everything has been going wrong so far, at least there have been several good people who have helped with good advice. I followed Tuule's advice and got a muesli bar and a banana to give my brain a boost of glucose. Let's see if that helps. The second session starts in 40 minutes, in the meantime I'm going to listen to a lecture by the well-known mental arithmetic champion George Lane on how to quickly do calculations with dates.

Hey-hey, all fans and supporters! The battery is dead :))))))), but he asked to pass on the news to all the thumb holders (so you can let your nails free for once) that he shared first place in lines of action. He will write more when the battery allows :D

Great result! Thumbs up! The thumbs up are excited and waiting for comments.

Hurray, continuous ovations, the crowd stands up in jubilation! Maybe instead of a poker night, we should organize a soft pillow night? But I guess trying to get a place in the poker general standings won't allow it... Good luck to both of you! Pihel

The fatigue is killing me. I still can't put my brain to work for 12 hours a day. In the morning I was stopped on the street and invited to take part in an advertisement somewhere because I supposedly have a nice hair color, a good haircut and, most importantly, I'm from Estonia. Unfortunately, I couldn't take part because I've only been here for a week. The block went well. In the first game, I barely came in second, due to one of my stupid mistakes. I only got -6 points, the others had almost -20. In the second game, I was at the same table with the same guy who won the first game. Right at the beginning, he started blocking me aggressively, and as a result, I was second after him again. After the first game, I went to see what Andrs was doing to find out about this guy's background. But since Andres was playing, I couldn't ask until after the second round. Well, it turned out that it was last year's champion Paco Carsia. Oh, I wish I had known that sooner. In the third round, I came in second again and felt pretty good. In the fourth or last round, I was completely overwhelmed when three young boys (two of them brothers, about 12 years old) made such a mess of me that I was left with 29 buttons. Andres saw and can confirm that there was nothing I could do there. I ended up fourth and ultimately behind.. But at least it went better than the previous days combined! There are pictures, they will come later as evidence. The last round, 5-card draw, also went pretty well. The place was 21, but at least it was a fun game. Once I got the house A over K and earned a chip bonus, but since the antes were growing, there was nothing left to do in the end but to go all-in with AK pairs on the last hand. However, I stumbled at the end of the line and there was nothing to do but to leave the table to applause. The important information is, of course, that David Pierce left the table before me, facing David Jameson. The rest of the table and I bet that David would come out on top in this duel, and we weren't wrong. Jameson and Ken were still playing when Andres and I left. Dekker left a minute after me. At least I've started to shine with my results. The organizers cheer with me every time I'm not last anymore! The way home went quickly. We're already mentally preparing for Kamisado and handing it over. Andres starts writing his post, while I go and try to sink into bed and fall asleep on the way down. The ambulance and police sirens here are the same as in Estonia. At the university, there's a big sign next to the sinks saying 'don't drink water here', and as a result, I drink Coca-Cola. The biggest success was that I found the FIRST grocery store. We've lived here for three days and eaten like in developing countries, but I got salad and warm chicken from the store. I had a tear in my eye when I ate warm food for the first time in a long time! Tomorrow is a new day and new impressions. Now Master Andres Kuusk will take the stage, welcome him with a big round of applause!

There are four main things in England that are radically different from Estonia. First, there are still no faucets in the water supply that would allow you to pour hot and cold water from one tap. As a result, the only option is to put your hands under boiling water and, when it starts to hurt like hell, turn on the ice-cold tap. Second, the English drive on the wrong side of the road and it is therefore completely impossible to understand the traffic. At least they have realized that it is completely impossible to understand and therefore every pedestrian crossing has a sign saying which way to look ("look left" or "look right" respectively). Third, we have shops in Estonia. And fourth, why you missed the post at half past four (but thanks to Karmen, the most important information still arrived) - namely, there are no sockets in England. Or, well, there are, but not ones where you could stuff wires. In the normal world, sockets have two horizontally arranged holes, but here they have three arranged in the shape of a triangle. So the battery charger you brought along is about as useful as Kertu's pair of aces and kings against a straight. The tournament too. After the lunch break, as usual, things took a turn for the worse. Hebbes played the opening well and I was soon in great difficulty. I was at a disadvantage in both position and time for the entire game and fought for my life for a long time. Hebbes himself expressed the course of this game best when he said "You did fight all the time". That's how we balanced most of the game between whether I would get back into the game or my position would fall apart. In the end, in a time crunch, with 31 seconds left on the clock, I unfortunately made a fatal mistake and it ended quickly. It seemed that everything was in shambles, but for the first time in these days, fortune had something in store for me - namely, Hebbes lost to the Chinese Ken Ho in the penultimate round due to a big blunder. Thank you, Goddess of Fortune, finally something. So we finally shared first place with Hebbes, the gold medal went to him with odds, but both received equal points of 95. The evening poker tournament offered little positive. The card did not run very well and we could not conjure anything good out of bad cards. So we did not even reach the second table and we received something like the end of the second ten. One of the most important events today was the arrival of the defending champion Paco Garcia de la Banda, who immediately made his presence known - second in oware and third in block, which together give 180 points and in any case immediately ahead of me. The leader position was taken today by the former champion Italian Dario de Toffoli, who firmly won oware and yesterday finished second in poker. H&T added fourth place and we already have three strong results. Michael Dixon, Matthew Hattrell and Tige Nnando, who have not had any titles so far, can also boast three good results. David Pearce, who I considered a favorite, is doing just as badly as I am, for example, he didn't win a single hand in poker today. Tomorrow I plan on Kamisado (I might still go back to English checkers, it depends a lot on which one has participants) and reverse checkers. There is nothing to hope for in the first of them, in the second one I will defend the gold medal from last year. So one can expect something different, but it seems like the Turkmen Durdyev dynasty is shuffling its cards.

If you find a larger store or an electrical goods store, they sell adapters that allow you to put a European plug into an English socket. I have already accumulated several of these in a drawer from my travels, I wish I had remembered, I could have brought them with me. Wouldn't it be wise to give up a few poker nights so you can rest and find a decent meal? Well done Kertu for making Paco waste his brainpower. It might pay off in the end in the medal race ;)

Last night and this morning, the following sequence of events occurred in chronological order: 1) Kertu drank a blue syrup that seemed exciting 2) She felt unwell in the morning and when she sneezed, foam came out of her nose 3) Harri investigated and we don't know what happened to his dishwashing detergent. Can anyone offer a logical explanation for this chain of events?

hahahaa.. you could really use a little vacation

Heh, these are the colorful foreign things that invite you to taste them - although on the other hand, we should have enough of these colorful liquids on the shelves in our stores. There was also a picture of a plum and a pear on the label. It reminds me of when I made myself a drink from pear syrup one morning when I was very sleepy and it seemed to have a very suspicious taste - but it was drinkable. Later it turned out that it was Bisang. This is when parents put juices and syrups from the country in old soda bottles and then it is normal if you have a refrigerator drawer full of juices from such bottles - sometimes the right stuff gets in there too. Tell me about the organizational side of things too. How much space is there, how well ventilated/lit, how many rooms are there for the event, how many people are there, etc.? Last time it was still very cozy and relatively cramped. Chess and backgammon took place in the same room - the backgammon players couldn't calmly roll their dice, the chess players were rattling their brains too loudly next to them. Or so it was, in any case, last year was a bit of a letdown.