Pentamind World Championship 2015

The IXX International Mind Sports Olympiad and its main attraction, the Pentamind World Championship (http://www.msoworld.com/pentamind/pentamind-scoring/), will take place this year in London from 23 to 31 August. There will be at least 3 serious contenders for the overall ranking from Estonia, plus as many other background players who will participate in individual events for fun. On the first day of the competition, the morning and/or afternoon sessions will feature Stratego, Backgammon, Settlers, Scrabble and 960-chess, and the evening session will feature 5 card draw, Kings Cribbage, Shogi and Hare&Tortoise. After reading in the rules that poker scoring cannot be used for Pentamind, the choice was easy for me: 2 sessions of chess and Hare&Tortoise in the evening. As for the others, I know that Martin and MAdli are choosing between Settlers and Backgammon, and in the evening they are also expected to come to race with the hare and the tortoise.

Good luck to you! Do the individual areas of poker count towards the pentamind calculation, or is poker excluded altogether?

Only one result from poker can be entered into the pentamind score as a single field. The overall poker score will be awarded a separate trophy.

I'll list here the areas we plan to participate in. Andres: 23 - Chess 960, Hare and Tortoise 24 - Kiirmale, 7 Card Stud 25 - Twixt, London Lowball 26 - Entropia 27 - Quoridor, Kamisado, Pineapple 28 - Lines of Action 30 - Blokus, Texas Hold'Em 31 - Boku, Lost Cities Martin: 23 - Settlers of Catan, Hare and Tortoise 24 - Backgammon, 7 Card Stud 25 - Backgammon, London Lowball 26 - Ticket to Ride, Omaha 27 - Superfut, Kamisado, Pineapple 28 - Carcassone 30 - Agricola, Gomoku 31 - Boku, Lost Cities Madli: 23 - Settlers of Catan, Hare and Tortoise 24 - Backgammon, 7 Card Stud 25 - Abalone, London Lowball 26 - Ticket to Ride, Omaha 27 - Superfut, Kamisado, Pineapple 28 - Lines of Action 30 - Agricola, Gomoku 31 - Boku, Lost Cities The full schedule can be seen here: http://www.msoworld.com/schedule/full-schedule/

The first tournaments are halfway through. Andres shares second place in chess with 2.5 points, having just beaten Marko Keskel. Marko has 1 point after three rounds. Martin is doing the best in Katan among the age groups. After two rounds, he has 19 points, Jaanus has 12, Madli has 8. There are currently five leaders in Katan, all of whom have a maximum of 22 points.

The first tournaments have now ended, although the full results are not yet out. Andres had a rather miserable second half of the tournament. He got one point out of three. Overall, he was tied for sixth place. Marko was still half a point behind Andres. Simneet Bassi won the Katani, James Heppel was second, Ankush was third. Martin was tied for eighth place. There are no results for me and Jaanus, but Jaanus was definitely ahead, while I more than doubled my points in the third round when I managed to win one table ;) The evening session is about to start. Martin decided to try five card draw in poker instead. Andres, Jaanus and I are going to play Hare and tortoise. Marko is trying another game of chess.

The evening session is slowly coming to an end. Marko has 5 out of 8 points in chess before the last round. Martin is in the last 5 in poker at the final table. The game is still going on. Hare and tortoise ended some time ago. Andres got 8th place, Jaanus was left tied for sixth place despite having the opportunity to play at the final table. I managed to win the first two rounds (meaning I was the leader then), and in the second round I played against Dario de Toffoli, Andres and James Heppel. I got the worst position as the leader at the final table and Jaanus didn't behave in the friendliest way either, but in the end I still won the silver medal of the tournament after James Heppel. Matthee Hathrell was left tied for third place.

Tournaments over. Martin was 4th out of 13 in poker. Marko had 5 points out of 9. There were 30 participants in chess. The first day is over. Now we need to rest up for tomorrow to start fighting again! At least the Estonians' medal count is open ;)

Well, not bad :D And generally, you can't be lucky at the beginning, you can't be lucky at the end...

This time there is also one important change in the rules: in addition to the usual formula (np)/(n-1)*100, the results of all areas are multiplied by the correction factor n/(n 1) instead of just individual small areas. My strategy of specializing in little-known games with deterministic full information suffers significantly as a result, and at least 2 of the previous 3 titles would not have been available under the current rules. Realistically, I can now count on around 460 points, and that too with perfect success. Of course, everyone loses in the results, since it is no longer possible to get 100 points, but so far I had just chosen areas where the correction factor was not applied. It seems that I will have to start playing the strategy again and choose Settlers instead of chess next year... Today I plan to play chess for the first 2 sessions and poker in the evening. Martin and Madli are going to play backgammon and I don't know about the others at the moment.