Eugene Hourany, Larry York and Stu Hendrickson occupy Board #11.	Table Markers help seat a big crowd quickly.

Host Saint Petersburg and the people will come (no matter where you end up playing). Another year of Saint Petersburg and another attendance increase in all three heats including a batch of new faces. Even a last-minute, unpublished room change could not deter players. What is a busy GM to do? The assigned times and rooms could not have been a better choice for the tournament ... a mix of early and late evening heats gave both the early birds and late risers a chance to play.

After some number crunching, the field of participants was whittled down to the top 16 players for the semi-finals and then the cream of the crop went on to the Final. The last board found Robert Cranshaw, Arthur Field, Tom DeMarco, and Curt Collins II in a fast sprint to a winner. Round 1 came and went without major incident except Tom was able to get an Observatory on the table. By the end of Round 2, Arthur had the other Observatory, Tom a Mistress, Robert was working on an early building strategy, and Curt seemed to be hanging on for the ride. Money problems seemed to stalk everyone as it was hard to setup an early money generator which caused expensive but important cards to go into people's hands to be paid for later.

Coming into Round 5, Robert had a clear lead on the building strategy, receiving twice as many building points as anyone else but was falling behind on the nobles. He took one more building to trigger an early end of the game. Already money poor and with a fist full of cards, the players only saw three nobles come out. Curt was able to buy the only affordable noble leaving the other players to stew on their inability to afford expensive nobles, like the judge. Curt had just enough cash to swipe a final judge to put him into a tight lead for nobles. Poor remainder cash caused some cards in hand not to be purchased by the end of the game. Noble bonuses caused everyone to sprint to the finish but some to fall back as a -5 point penalty was applied to each card in hand not purchased.

A nervous finish found Curt with 53 points, Tom 50, Arthur 47, and Robert 37. Curt's victory was all the more surprising for being the only alternate to make it into the semi-finals. Beware those given a second chance.

I regret that I will be unable to GM this event next year so volunteers are solicited.

Chris Palermo takes a break from Superstar Baseball at Board #14.	The finalists do their thing in the hunt for big laurels.