New Era, Former GM!

Ticket to Ride this year saw the departure of the great GM Claire Brosius and the return of Katie Gray (formally McCorry). While I had run the tournament before I had previously had a lot of help from my dad, Tom McCorry, so this year was my first time doing it on my own. I did have a lot of set up help from Katherine McCorry and my son Logan whose highlight of the week was running around with the Caboose Hat. We also had several first time WBC players assist with the large set up required to make the event get started quickly and people playing on time. Thank you to Andy Latto for the GM spreadsheet that made it easy to manage the large amount of data from this large event.

We had a total of 261 players which is just shy of the 281 from the pre-covid 2019 convention. Throughout the entire tournament a total of 169 games of Ticket to Ride were played. We had only two players that won all four Heats: Doug McNaron and Tyler Houle. There were 24 two game winners and 120 unique winners overall. Despite this the golden rule of “You can’t advance if you don’t show up” was not followed and the Quarterfinal saw less than 64 of the 120 winners present.

We had several notable scores. The highest score was in the fourth Heat during a Ticket to Ride 1910 game when with 7/7 tickets made and a route score of 75 with both bonuses Preston Saccenti scored 218 points. The lowest winning score was 103. The highest losing score was 143 to Robert St. Pierre who made 11/11 tickets during his game of 1910. Unfortunately, the lowest score was -6 and occurred during the Semfinal.

This year saw mainly Ticket to Ride 1910 played during the Heats though the base game contingent remained strong. Only one or two Ticket to Ride: Europe games were played each heat. All advanced rounds were played with Ticket to Ride 1910 to help prevent shutouts and losses due to poor ticket draw. Although this still occurs it happens less frequently.

The Final was played Sunday morning with Andrew George starting as the randomly assigned start players followed by Jeff Wu, Tony Bosca and Max Du Buff. Jeff came in fourth with 60 points. Of note at the beginning of the game he kept 3 tickets and turn 3 took tickets and kept another 4 making a total of 7 tickets. While Jeff’s total ticket score was zero, he tied for Globetrotter with 5/7 tickets completed. His route score was 45. Max came in 3rd with a score of 111. He completed 4/4 tickets and had a route score of 60. He also had the longest train bonus. Tony Bosca came in 2nd with 116 points. He shared Globetrotter with Jeff completing 5/6 tickets. His route score was 50. While Andrew did not have any of the end of game bonuses, he took the lead after catching everyone off guard and ending the game by playing a 6 train route with only 6 train cards in hand. Of note during the first turn everyone placed trains. Nashville to Atlanta was claimed along with both Portland to Seattle routes and one of the two Pittsburgh to NYC. On the 3rd round the other Pittsburgh to NYC was built.