Ivanhoe continued with the three late night heats at WBC. The 11 pm time slot proved to be popular as we saw a 45% increase in attendance. That shows the dedication of gamers as they played one last game before heading on back to their rooms for some sleep.
 
Where possible, games were kept to the five-player format, with the four-player format used as a backup. We had a total of 20 gamers show up for the Tuesday night heat, 34 for Wednesday night and 38 for the Thursday night heat. A total of 19 games were played in the three heats, providing 16 winners eligible for the semi-finals. David Duncan received top billing as he won in all three heats he entered. Steve Scott had second billing as he won in two of the three heats he entered. Steve was randomly picked to be at David Duncan's table in the third heat meaning there could only be one possible three heat winner in the tournament.
 
A list of the 16 winners and 16 runners-up were eligible for the semi-finals on Friday morning. Of the list, 13 winners and eight runners-up appeared. The semi-finals were set up to accept 16/20/25 finalists, meaning that the GM was knocked out to arrive at the round number of 20 finalist. All five semi-final games were close with every player getting at least two of the four chips needed for the win.
 
The winner of each of the five semi-final games advanced to the Final. Congratulations to Dave Buchholz as winner of the 2006 tournament, winning by getting the purple/blue/red/yellow chips.
 
A few interesting comments were submitted. One of the closest games was in Heat 2 between Tom Dunning, Jeff Spaner, David Duncan, Mike Confoy and Mark Love. There were at least five tricks where a winner could have been named. They were held off till David was able to pull off the win. In a Heat 1 game between Greg Courter, John Speck, Jeff Cornett, Jeff Senley and Chris LeFevre, Greg was able to get his fourth chip for victory by just playing only supporters.
 
There was some confusion in Heat 2. The GM had the event taking place in Ballroom A from the web-guide, while the main program had it listed in the Cornwall room. This caused delay in the start time of Heat 2 while things were figured out. The good news was that Keith Levy had rally cry for attendees to go to the GMT website and request that Ivanhoe be added to their P500 list to get the game back in print. This is a valid rally cry as the game continues to be popular to play and is very easy to teach others. Ken Lee can validate this as he won the first game of Ivanhoe he played in Heat 3, then won his second game played in the semi-final and almost won his third in the Final. If you do not know of the P500 program that GMT has set up, please contact the GM to get more information on this or talk with someone at the GMT booth in the dealer room.
 
NOTE: This event was disqualified from eligibility for WBC 2007 due to failure to provide an event report on time. Here it is ... better late than never.