Strong Growth For Union Pacific

Forty-three railroad engineers competed in this year’s Union Pacific event, up significantly from last year’s 30. The tournament this year had all rounds scheduled on the same day, the first Sunday. The first of the three preliminary rounds had nine tables of four players. Five people dropped out and one new player then joined to make eight tables of four for the second round. More new players arrived for the third round and a few dropped, but we still had eight tables for a total of 25 games played for the three preliminary rounds. A total of sixteen people advanced to the semifinals to produce the four finalists consisting of Rod Davidson, Pete Gathman, Henry Ho, and Todd Augenstein.

Assistant GM’s Jeff Jackson and Cliff Ackman assisted for the four rounds.

The 2017 final was more exciting than last year due to the many lead changes. Rod started the game investing in Kansas City, brown. Pete made his initial investment in Miami, yellow. Henry revealed his first investment to be Mexican, white, and Todd started off with Sioux Falls, purple. As the GM, I took a look at each starting hand and noticed that even though everyone invested in a different stock, each player had an almost identical hand with 4 of the 5 cards matching. This lead to the early breaking of monopolies as Rod played yellow on his first 2 card choices and Henry and Todd then followed with plays of white and purple. No one seemed to want the green stocks and when 4 appeared on the face up area, they flushed and the game sped on.

The race for the coveted UP stock ended up with Pete and Todd tying at 5 each with Henry and Rod tying with 4 each. I noticed that Rod had twice traded a UP for a UP which had a large effect on the UP payouts.

All 4 players were getting greedy after the second dividend, and they had an unusual number of stocks in their hands. The third dividend came quickly and Henry’s investments had him clearly in the lead. The end was exciting as everyone wanted to invest all of their stocks before the fourth dividend arrived. Henry invested in 3 of his last 4 plays, but Pete invested in all 4 of his last 4 plays with the last one being 3 white shares to steal the lead away from Henry in white. The next card off the draw pile was the last dividend and the steal in white gave Pete the win

Final scores were of Pete Gathman $120, Rod Davidson $108, Henry Ho $107 and Todd Augenstein $102.