The format for $GREED changed a bit this year. A second round of turns was added to the tournament so that the top eight scorers in the first round advanced to the second round with the highest cumulative total for the four turns winning the tournament. I made this format change for numerous reasons but mainly: 1) to add some decision making, 2) to reduce the number of zero scores, 3) to lower overall scores, 4) to add some suspense and 5) to more closely resemble the actual game of $GREED. I felt the changes were successful in achieving most, if not all, of these goals.

In order to keep the time to about an hour, two tables were run simultaneously in the first round. David Metzger postied the first non-zero score at 700 points. Immediately after David posted his score, Rebecca Hebner scored the highest cumulative first round score of 2350, which included a set of 4 "D"s for 1000 points on her second roll. Dennis Nicholson posted the first non-zero score at the other table with 1250 points. Bill Place and Thomas Stokes tied for the top scoring single turn in the first round when each of them scored 1700 points on their respective second turns. Thomas was helped in compiling the 1700 points in the second turn by rolling a 1000-point scoring combination of "$GREED". Jeff Finkeldey used the same 1000-point scoring combination on his second turn to accumulate 1750 points for his two rolls in the first round. Meanwhile, Phil Bradley managed to roll a combination of "$GREED" on his first roll of the dice for his second turn, but then failed to get any scoring combination on the next roll of all six dice and lost the 1000 points. Rich Curtin scored 1600 points on his first turn (including 1000 points for another "$GREED" combination), and 2000 points total to qualify for the second round. Andy Gardner was the first player to bump another score off the qualification list by scoring 900 points, eliminating David Metzger's 700. Michael Destro rolled a set of four "D's for 1000 points and accumulated 1550 points on his second turn before he pressed his luck and ended up losing it all. Finally, Henry Richardson used "$GREED" to post a score of 1900 points to be the last qualifier for the second round. The score needed to qualify for the second round of the tournament ended up being 1600 points with the highest score being Rebecca's 2350.

In the second round, each player in reverse scoring order took one turn at a time. Ken Gutermuth was first to roll and scored 400 points, giving him 2000 to putll within striking distance of the leader. The next two players, John
Jacoby and Thomas Stokes, failed to scored and remained at 1700 points. William Place went next and scored 800 points on his first roll to take the lead at 2500. Jeff Finkeldey was next and failed to score, to remain at 1750. Henry Richardson then scored 700 to take the lead at 2600. Rich Curtin didn't score and remained at 2000 points. Finally, the first round leader, Rebecca Hebner, scored 300 points to reclaim the lead at 2650.

The final turns of the second round started off badly as everyone tried to pull ahead of Rebecca. The first five players failed to score. Finally, the sixth player, Henry Richardson, managed to chalk up 600, giving him a total of 3200 and the lead. Rich Curtin couldn't produce enough to pass Henry and ended up scoring nothing for his last turn. This left Rebecca as the last challenger to Henry - some 600 points behind. Her first roll yielded a set of 3 "R"s and a single "D" for 500. She
needed to roll the remaining two dice and get one more "D" to win. She got not only the "D" but a "G" as well, which is also a scoring combination. Rebecca had to score both the "D" and the "G" and roll all six dice again. If she failed to get a scoring combination, she would lose the 650 points and Henry would win. Rebecca rolled the six dice and breathed a sigh of relief, as there was at least one scoring combination. She had scored with all six dice on a set of four "D"s, another single "D" and a single "G" for an additional 1150 points. However, by scoring with all six dice, Rebecca had to roll all six again. At this point, Rebecca was heard to exclaim, "Just make it stop." True to her plea, the dice yielded a set of three green "E"s, two "D"s and a single "R". Since the "R"was not part of a scoring combination, she scored an additional 500 points for a final turn score of 2300 points and 4950 total ... earning her the second of four plaques for the week. Perhaps it is true that luck is a lady as the fair gender has taken this event three years in a row.

The new format did seem to accomplish the goal of reducing the scores since the highest first round score was 2350 points in comparison to the winning score of 3400 points (for two turns) in 2000. In addition, we saw a drastic reduction in the percentage of players shut out in the first round. The percentage of zero scores increased from 61.1% in 1998 to 76.9% in
1999 and then up again to 80.7% in 2000. This year, only 51 of the 80 participants, or 63.8%, were shut out.

The GM would like the participants to let him know if the new format was an improvement . In addition, if we use the same format next year, the GM would like to have increase the number of tables running concurrently in the first round, so if anyone could bring a set of $GREED dice next year, notify him. Finally, the GM would like to thank his assistant GMs, Ken Gutermuth and Ken Samuel, and the two volunteers who recorded all of the scores at the tables, Debbie Garver and Richard Irving, for their assistance in running the two tables allowing me to oversee the whole tournament and maintain the scores on the "leader" board.