World Mind Games 2010 - Andres Kuusk won the silver medal!

The 14th World Mindfulness Championships will be held in London from August 21 to 30. The best 5 results from each competitor in nearly 30 disciplines will be taken into account, which will determine the ranking. Estonia will be represented at the competitions by the two best Estonian World Mindfulness Champions this year, Tiit Vunk and Andres Kuusk. Since several parties have expressed a desire to keep them updated on the progress of the competitions, we will try to do this via the Vindi forum if possible. This is of course made more difficult by the fact that tournaments take place for 8-12 hours a day and there may simply be little time to search the internet. Since Estonia is probably not very familiar with the top athletes in this discipline, we will end with some expected favorites. We should probably start with last year's medal trio: gold - Martyn Hamer (England), silver - Tim Hebbes (England), bronze - Dario De Toffoli (Italy). We should also keep in mind previous world champions Alain Dekker (South Africa), Jan Stastna (Czech Republic), David Pearce (England), etc. The most well-known figure in the field is probably five-time world champion Demis Hassabis (England).

Good luck to you anyway. Let the idea run!

For athletes, competitions are a celebration. The grueling training period is behind us and we can reap the benefits of this training. The same goes for mental athletes. Two and a half months of almost daily practice have finally become so tiring that starting competitions is truly like a vacation. But since so many people have been telling me to report on life in London in addition to the results, here's an introduction to yesterday's travel day. ON THE EVE Sometimes a bad surprise hits before you even have time to prepare for it. This time, when we arrived at Tartu airport, it turned out that the Tartu-Riga flight had been cancelled and a bus had been organized instead. Things got even "better" when we finally arrived in Riga, missing the flight by 5 minutes and having to spend 6 hours at Riga airport. Fortunately, there is no good without the bad, and during major reorganizations, I was accidentally put in business class. The flight passed by in the company of delicious steak on silver plates and a copy of "From Paris with Love" (a typical Hollywood film with action from start to finish, but no substance at the beginning or end; and where John Travolta somehow looked like Bruce Willis), and the flight passed by incredibly quickly. The first thing we saw when we left the train station in London was, of course, the famous red double-decker bus. We still managed to see Big Ben, the 150-meter Londoneye Ferris wheel and Westminster Abbey on the first night. Today, Trafalgar Square, St. James Park, Buckingham Palace and numerous red old-fashioned telephone booths were added to them. I started to like London from the first moments (Tiidu didn't really like it, New York always seemed to be giving me goosebumps) - English conservatism and a sense of style emanate from every step. MALE The decline of the World Mental Sports Championship is clearly noticeable. One can only dream of the time when magnificent halls and conference rooms in central London were booked and a cheque for a quarter of a million kronor came with the multi-sport world championship title. Today, 3 areas were accommodated in the cramped rooms of the Soho Theatre at once and it is interesting to wait to see what will happen tomorrow, when over 50 participants have registered for Scrabble alone. The competition areas planned today were chess, backgammon and cribbage. Of course, I chose chess, Tiit backgammon. Among the more well-known players were last year's silver medalist and 2007 world champion Tim Hebbes and over several years also five-time world champion Demis Hassabis. At least today, the reigning world champion Martyn Hamer was not in sight, nor last year's bronze and also former gold medalist Dario De Toffoli, but their trump cards are still to come. The first seed in the chess tournament was A. Khandelwal, the favorites certainly included Hassabis, the international champion, and Etan Ilfeld, the champion in the USA. I was rewarded with fifth place. The tournament went surprisingly well. Since I don't remember anything about the openings, my strategy was to avoid the opening altogether - I played Rf3, g3, Og2, 0-0, etc. Before the last round, I had already managed to beat both Khandelwal (one of the best games of my life) and Hebbes, and I was in 3rd-5th place. However, for the decisive round, I was drawn against the greatest of the greats - Demis Hassabis himself. I was afraid that this would end the successful part of the tournament, but it turned out the opposite. Despite the black pieces, I managed to seize the initiative in the early middlegame with an unexpected trick battle and steer the game to victory without any major failures. And even better - both leaders lost, so I actually moved up to share first place. In the multi-event classification, this should give about 94.4 points (out of 100 possible), which currently gives a share of third place. Tiit will give a brief overview of the backgammon tournament below.

Fantunes has added such a thorough post here that it's hard to add anything - except a little about backgammon: Many people may have heard of the game itself, but I don't know if they've played it with the correct rules. For me, it was more of a new game. The idea is that you have to bring your pieces home and the number and length of moves depends on how many dice allow - so it's relatively a game of chance. However, as with nails and podkidnoi, you need to know how to play most advantageously; you have to consider the opponent's options and the probabilities of what might happen next. Backgammon was played to 7 points. 7 points could come from one game, but it could also come from 7 games. And this is how the Swiss system was played through 5 rounds. A doubling rule was added - if the player thought he had the upper hand on the board and he would win that game, he doubled his bets. The opposing player either gave the opponent a point (or gave up, and a new game started), or went along with the game, and whatever the result, the points were doubled. If everything was double, the player to whom the offer was made had the opportunity to double the game again. ETC. If there were three doublings, there were already 8 points in the game. The tournament went so that I got a miserable 7:0 kill from the first opponent. The opponent knew all the strategies and knew what he was doing. But that was enough to start getting into it. The third game was already equal to equal, and I already beat the last opponent (although with a little luck, because that's how the game is). PS I got to travel in regular class, where there was a screaming child in the front seat, and a guy in the passenger seat who couldn't sit still for a moment - even a minute before takeoff he needed to start the laptop and surf around a bit :P But otherwise it was nice to blow my 1.5 lats compensation at Riga Airport...

Andres, try not to get less than 100.0 points in the future :) By the way, Air Baltic recently sent a plane half the size to Yerevan, so Marje Mets was only miraculously able to squeeze herself onto the Yerevan - Riga flight.

Thanks for the nice long review, Andres and Tiit. Andres' chess result is especially impressive, so keep these two most powerful games in mind and show them later. I'll keep my fingers crossed! Pihel

The World Championship really got underway today. There are already 120 participants from twenty countries. There were so many people that each event was held on a different floor and the reigning world champion Martyn Hamer and last year's bronze medalist Dario De Toffoli also arrived (apparently they didn't think they were strong enough in yesterday's events and didn't want to waste their energy). The competition events today were English checkers, xiang-qi (Chinese chess) and scrabble. Since the tournaments were taking place in parallel, I had to choose one of them. In reality, I am definitely the strongest of the three at checkers, but I still decided in favor of Chinese chess. There is some indescribable something about Chinese chess that draws me towards it. I first experienced this attraction on the streets of Beijing the year before last, where I was left with an indelible impression that a whole street full of people had come to watch the old men of retirement age compete. They say it is a magical game and you have to agree with that. Compared to regular chess, xiang-qi is much faster and more exciting (about like Premier League vs Serie A), closer to action from the first moves. Of course, there was also a more pragmatic reason for deciding in favor of xiang-qi over English checkers - I knew that grandmaster David Kotin and international champion Tony Boyle were participating in checkers, and I assumed that the level of xiang-qi would simply be weaker. However, I obviously made a mistake with the selection: there were few participants (primarily due to the rule introduced this year, according to which the number of participants affects the number of points awarded in the tournament more than before, which in turn means that weaker players are not interested in participating in the tournament, because each additional player gives more points to the stronger ones. Thus, the "gray mass" prefers an area where almost everyone has a chance (like scrabble), rather than pure skill games where there is no hope for experts (like checkers or xiang-qi)), which is why fewer points were awarded and everyone who participated was an expert. The most unpleasant thing, however, was the fact that, unlike the European chess design I am used to, the game was played with exactly the same buttons, distinguished only by the Chinese hieroglyphs drawn on them! So I left a pretty poor impression of myself when I couldn't even put the pieces in the starting position, but by following the others I finally managed to do it and in the 5 minutes remaining until the start of the tournament I had to frantically remember which hieroglyph corresponded to which trick. I got to play against both the reigning champion Hamer and the former champion Alain Dekker from South Africa. I met the latter in the opening round and Black was completely run over by a train. It's no wonder, he's an experienced tournament player. And if you call that defeat a train wreck, then the second round game with the Chinese Lai was even worse. Fortunately, that was the end of the devastation and from then on I only admitted victories, which eventually lifted me to a third place tie. The decisive match with world champion Hamer was also certainly helpful, where I obviously won through a stalemate and with the last second on the clock, thanks to the fact that I put all my effort into a unique checkmate attack that my opponent did not notice. Despite 3rd place, I was only awarded 50 points, which of course does not make me happier and hopefully will not be among the top 5 results (in order to do anything, you would need to get all 5 results of at least 80 points). The tournament was won outright by the Chinese, which was of course a painful blow for Dekker, as he was certainly hoping for a much higher score in this area. The checkers tournament that took place at the same time showed that he might not have collected enough points there either - Tiit was still among the average players, and in English checkers his black is certainly not weaker. I also mentioned how he let international champion Boyle draw in the final game with the most pieces, but he will probably write more about this tournament himself. In the evening we played poker again (some strange variant, which Tiit also writes about at length), but without much success. The fateful hand for me was a draw, where I waited for several rounds of a straight flush, but what didn't come was a straight flush. So overall, today is a disaster, neither xiang-qi nor poker points will count for me (at least I hope so; if they do, the devastation will be even greater in the following days). Tomorrow I am especially looking forward to the Lines of Action tournament, which has been a success in practice games so far. Blokus is also scheduled for tomorrow.

Today's most notable achievement was obviously that we managed to find a fairly direct route through the heart of London to our accommodation. Today's half-hour journey took at least an hour and a half yesterday, during which we managed to take a detour to St James Park and also see Buckingham Palace, which I definitely plan to visit in the coming days. English Checkers. This was an area that quite a few Vint.ee users would probably participate in. The level was exactly such that everyone was actually playable opponents. As Andres mentioned above, I did indeed have a winning game against the English Checkers international grandmaster (I assume my facts are correct) Tony Boyle. I had 4 pieces against his 3. But instead of moving the piece in the middle of the square directly into checkers (deck), I decided to block one of his regular pieces with it and then my already checkered piece ended up in exactly such an idiotic place that he changed 1:2 and each of them had 2 pieces on the board and it was a draw. Sometimes I'm smarter and I take the win against the grandmaster. Settlers of Katani Andres missed the game that was also played today. Because of this, it was even narrower there than usual, and we played checkers somewhere on the first floor in the corridor, 10m from the front door. At this point, I would like to talk a little about the organizational aspect. Such a place to play left a relatively poor organizational impression on me. The competition was conducted by the great figure of checkers, Mr. Kotin, who before the tournament started asked the participants what kind of time control they wanted, and whether they could play one game or 2 games (with both colors) with one opponent. What made it even more confusing was the fact that the real boys from Turkmenistan managed to change their minds 5 times about whether they wanted to participate or not. In the end, they did not participate. So it took about 45 minutes to start arguing. In addition to the above, I was able to play a position against one opponent where each player had 4 pieces on, I had 30 seconds, the opponent 2 minutes. We changed our pieces relatively quickly to 2:2, in the meantime I also offered a draw a couple of times. However, the opponent did not react to this at all. We then continued playing and when the 2:2 score finally came, he managed to move his pieces so stupidly that I was on the verge of winning and when I needed to make 2 more moves before I could start picking up his pieces, I ran out of time. The opponent told me this and a situation arose where I demanded a draw from it. Mr. Kotin decided that he would give the victory to his opponent, since the time was running out - there is no rule that if a certain number of moves are made, it is automatically a draw, etc. Can someone comment on this situation? I got the impression that if each player has 2 buttons on the table, I have 10 minutes to play, and the opponent has 5 minutes, then I have a chance to beat him/her down... these international checkers rules seemed strange to me anyway. Poker (7 card stud - Pot limit) The game goes like this: at the beginning, each player is dealt 3 cards. The first 2 are so-called closed cards, and the third is an open card, i.e. face up. Then comes the betting round. Then the cards are dealt face up one by one, with betting rounds in between. If there are 4 open cards on the table, then the 7th card is dealt face down to the player again. The best 5-card combination out of these 7 cards counts. Pot limit means that the bet cannot be raised more than what is in the "pot" at the moment (This information is for those who didn't know it yet). There were 20 participants and I was the 8th to leave the table. 13th place for me. It's hard to comment. When I sat down at the table, I immediately saw that about half of my opponents were playing with their chips in their hands - like in the movie they quickly changed the location of two chips with their fingers. For me, as a poker layman, it's a completely unrealistic activity. But I can be satisfied. There will be more pokers and in the future the goal is to reach a little further each time. I'm looking forward to the next days - especially Othello, which is on Thursday.

Although it is a mental sports World Cup, we also have to deal with physical sports in the meantime. As Tiit already mentioned, we managed a truly brilliant orienteering feat yesterday. After some progress in an unknown direction, we discovered that we were back in the exact same place we were about an hour ago. Later, when we looked it up on the map, it turned out that we walked around St James Park. Whatever, it's a good thing we did it anyway - Hyde Park is right next to St James Park, which is many times bigger than the previous one. Today, between the areas, I decided to find a pub and watch the Fulham-Manchester United football match. I found a pub, but unfortunately there was a burly man at the door who explained that just entering the pub costs 15 pounds, which is almost 300 kroons in Estonian money. Of course, I wasn't impressed by this disguise, but these pubs should probably manage well nonetheless. The football culture in England is really great. Despite the £15 entrance fee, the pubs are packed on match nights and there is no space to stand on the street in front of the pubs. The team shirts worn in London are exclusively Arsenal and Chelsea (London clubs) and there is probably no one who does not know last night's results by heart. I also tried to get some clues for my Fantasy Football team and found out that Kolarov has been injured, which means that I only have one man left in the entire defensive line. Of course, I could have replaced the injured guys, but I decided that at least as long as I have not completely ruined my World Cup hopes, I will calmly accept the setbacks and not use my already scarce brain resources on other things (perhaps this also explains the walk around St James' Park). In addition to fusion sports, we are excitedly waiting for the first extreme sports area - a definite plan is to ride the Londoneye 150 meters above the sky and venture underground on the subway. But first, Blokus and Lines of Action.

By the way, do these Chinese pieces have some kind of European design? :). When Ando and I played a game, it really bothered me that I couldn't remember what something was. Anyway, I should try this game again :)