Thompson Turns 2nd Hand Expedition Bonus Into Championship!

The 24th WBC Lost Cities Tournament was a fast-paced adventure into expeditions unknown … or at least mathematical uncertainty. 145 unique players played a total of 180 games of Lost Cities.

Our winner this year was James Thompson, defeating former champion Natasha Metzberg in the final round. The Final ended in careful play between 12:30 AM and 1:00 AM, with some friends and teammates of the four top players watching to see how it would turn out and making “helpful suggestions” about which GM prize to pick.

The 2025 tournament continued to use the format developed by Ivan Lawson. Round 1 consisted of four Heats spread over three days. All winners of two Heats advanced to Single Elimination play. Winners in each Round of Single Elimination advance to the next round until the game came down to two winners playing head-to-head for the wood. Just to be clear, winning a Heat is the best total score of playing the same opponent for 3 hands of Lost Cities. The idea of this format is two-fold: (1) If you can win two games you are good at this game and should get to play Single Elimination, and (2) you can win this tournament if you can only show up for WBC on the last weekend.

The four Heats saw eight 3-game or 4-game winners and 34 additional 2-game winners. In the 138 games played in the Heats, the scores were a bit less extreme than previous years. The highest score was 245, the lowest was -42. The lowest score that won a game was 25, and the highest score that lost a game was 149. Several games were wone by less than 3 points, but one game was won by a difference of 192 points!

Thirty-four winners of two or more heats showed up to play the first Single Elimination round, including six former champions. The second round of single elimination always requires some filtering to get the numbers down to 16 players. In this case, your GM played as an eliminator, and, failing at the elimination (as everyone was hoping), only one losing player was eliminated.

The winners of the Round of 16 advancing to the Quarterfinal were Steve Packwood, Howard Marron, Ryan Romanik, Natasha Metzger, Cliff Flachsenhar, James Thompson, David Hitchcock, and Rachel LaDue. Just a note here on the persistently good play by Cary Morris, who did not Laurel in Lost Cities this year, but who has been in the Round of Eight for 5 years, and has scored laurels for second, third, and fourth while seeking elusive wood. The tournament is better for his consistent play.

This year, two people had picked Lost Cities as their Team Game … not too surprising since we are one of the high-points-for-winning games because of the large turnout over 4 days. Unfortunately, neither of them made the Quarterfinal. The Quarterfinal saw the defeat of Howard, Ryan, Cliff, and Rachel to Steve, Natasha, James, and David.

The Semifinals, the highest and lowest winners from the Quarterfinal played each other and the two with middle scores played each other. Natasha defeated Steve and James defeated David. In the later rounds, the games seemed to show more cautious play until a good hand was possible, and then the player would go all in for a critical hand.

Natasha and James played for first and second, and (because there was a plaque involved) Steve played David for third and fourth. It was now 12:30 AM and these four players had been playing Lost Cities for almost 5 hours straight.

The Final was very tight in the first hand, with Natasha leading James by only 3 points. But James got a 20-point bonus in the Rainforest expedition in the second hand, winning that hand by 60 points. Although the third hand was essentially a tie, Natasha couldn’t catch up from that great second hand, and James became our Champion.

A word of thanks from your GM to all of you who played, for your graciousness, your understanding, and your patience as the paperwork for over 350 player-starts had to be processed quickly. You made the tournament fun, and I hope I have made it easy for you. This tournament sometimes feels like a World Series of Poker Feeder Tournament as almost 150 people sit down to play, but your enthusiasm makes it fun, even when I’m overwhelmed.

My heartfelt thanks to my hard-working AGM Steve Cuccaro for his constant support and good humor, for his mastery of the Andy Lotto spreadsheet as adapted for a game with a large cycle of single elimination rounds, and for his ability this year to print almost everything I needed for the Sunday morning dash-of-the-paperwork. Maybe I could do this without you, Steve, but it would require increasingly large amounts of alcohol.

I hope you’ll all come back next year for another exciting card-play tournament on the grandest scale. It is fun to be a part of it.