El Grande held to its usual "early in the week" schedule, with the goal of having the tournament completed by Thursday afternoon, ahead of the weekend crush of Finals and semi-finals. This year, 20 preliminary games generated no double winners. Two qualifiers (Bryan Birkenstock and defending champ Curt Collins) played all three heats, both finally getting their needed win in the last heat . The highest winning score was a 125-point showing by JR Geronimo; the lowest, a 74 point squeaker by Dominic Duchesne.

This WBC marked the first in this GM's experience of not having enough people appear for the semi-finals. Even after tracking down Rebecca Hebner, we were one short of the 25 slots, so one game proceeded shorthanded with four players.

Not only did this year's semi-finals have six of the last seven champions, but we have started to see the emergence of unruly youths crashing the party. Both Yoni Weiss (who also qualified for last year's semi-final) and Drew Duboff have played previously. They obviously get their troublemaking tendencies from their dads.

Two of the semi-finals generated a tie, both resorting to the second tiebreaker to determine a winner. Four of the six former champions advanced, with the fifth seat claimed by none other than Drew, making him the youngest finalist in the tournament's history.

Since the GM and his assistant were both finalists, the note-taking was pretty much non-existent, but hey, we do the best we can. Drew did manage to get off to a lead with an early score card, helped somewhat by Rob playing for position instead of points, when he moved the king onto a region where Drew had sole control. Jay Fox fell behind midway through the game, but caught up briefly on a card that scored the 6s and 7s, then started to trail again and was never quite able to close a 10-15 point gap in the scores.

In the midgame, Rob started to pull ahead, only in a relative sense, since other scores were tightly grouped with the exception of Jay. This led to some attacks on Rob's position, at one point provoking a complete "retrenching" move wherein Rob moved his Grande out of his original home territory (where he was third) to New Castille, where he had no pieces at all, but a large Castillo force waiting to pounce.

Meanwhile, Curt was playing exactly as one should in such a tight game, building up position on the board in preparation for the final scores. Rob still had the lead, but his previous positions of firsts and seconds had dropped into measly thirds while Curt had several firsts and seconds across the board. A large buildup in the Castillo still had the chance to upset Curt's comeback, but he did not choke and managed a win with a four-point margin. In successfully defending his title, Curt became only the second two-time champion.