In our customary spot at the end of the first day of WBC, it is time for Las Vegas! A great opportunity to just throw dice and hope that they cooperate enough for your plans to work out.
188 players showed up to play Las Vegas this year, which is another small increase from the previous year and brings us just short of our highest attendance, which took place in 2019. Finding enough copies took a little bit of scrambling, thank you to anyone that happened to have an extra copy in their backpack that we used on the evening. We might be able to break 200 players next year with how trends are looking.
The biggest winners in the first round were RJ Gleaton and Brandon Buchanan who put up huge totals at their tables of 520K and 510K, respectively. Totals needed to win at other tables ranged from 480K to 270K showing that sometimes having a bit of good luck was more important than making the big money.
The second round featured 36 players having advanced with the top 2 finishers from each table getting to move on to the Semifinal. This would give us 14 seats for players to compete to advance. Competition was tight in this round with everyone wanting a chance to play for a spot in the Final. One match even saw RJ and Susan Singer tie for the win at their table, but since both would advance there was no concern about checking tiebreakers.
14 players in the Semifinal were set up at 3 tables with 2 from each table advancing to give us a 6 players final. All 3 tables produced 2 clear cut finalists, with our Final being Jordan Shea, Chris Russell, Andy Latto, Jordyn Felici, Michael Murtagh and Brandon Buchanan.
Jordan Shea took an early lead scoring 130K in the opening round, this was on the strength of picking up 60K with one die, while Jordyn Felici and Brandon Buchanan cancelled each other out with 4 dice. He was followed closely by Chris Russell who managed to pick up 110K. In the 2nd round Jordan and Chris continued to fight over the lead, while Jordyn made up ground to close to 20K away from the lead. Part of this strong round came from picking up 50K off of one die while 4 other players at the table had 2 dice in the same casino, cancelling each other out! Round 3 did not see a lot of very interesting action, the front runners scored the least in the round while the other 3 players that had struggled in the opening rounds scored enough to tighten the field, but not enough to change the standings at the top. In the final round Jordan picked up another 90K to manage a solid victory, leading the field from start to finish. The big story in the final round though was Michael Murtagh, he was tied for last place going into the final round, but he picked up a whopping 190K in the final round to come crashing into 2nd place at the end. His wife Anne, who had come in 3rd just last year, had to make the good natured comment of, "you just had to do better than me".
Congratulations to Jordan Shea on winning the event this year, and congratulations to everyone that made it to the Final. Also, thanks to everyone that came out to the event this year, see you all next year.
|
|
|
The next generation of gamers enjoying the late night in Las Vegas. |
Eric Freeman and the Sacenti brothers join the crowd in the Las Begas Ballroom. |
|
|
Andrew Drummond and your CD watching Noah Drummond make his move in Round 2. |
These gamers are happy they made it past the first round. |
|
Adam Hurd [6th Year] |
|
|
|