Our second of six sessions for the Lansing Lightning Flippers women’s league happened drew nine players, resulting in a neat division into three-player groups. Abby, Sarah, and Mackenzie joined for the first time this season, but Dana and Stephanie were both out of town and we also missed Christy, Lexi, and Marnie. The Swiss pairings resulted in very evenly-matched groups, evidently, since both the top group and the second group had a three-way tie in points, and the third group had a tie between two of the three players.
The Swiss pairings during the second session were based on the first night’s results, but from here on out, they will be based on the current season standing. Since the lowest night of the six is dropped for each player, that means that the third session will have everyone seeded according to their single best night.
We have continued the tradition I started last season of having a very silly side tournament on my American Girl pinball machine in order to get players IFPA rated. I admit I have some regrets about having started that, though, since it has caused me to lose my longtime high score on the game. The game actually keeps a high score in its memory and shows it on startup. I had set a score of about 330K very soon after getting the game for Christmas several years ago, and it had been there ever since, until I started using it for this side tournament. Then Tim exceeded it by a small amount during a Lightning Flippers game, but I reckoned I could get it back if I actually put some effort into it. My hopes for this were basically dashed as Tim put up something over 700K during the side tournament last time, and even if I think I could beat that with enough effort, I’m not sure I want to have to play a game on it that long. The highest value target only scores 10K.
Currently, Tim is in the lead for the season, two points ahead of a three-way tie between Amy, Elke, and me. Keep in mind that this is only going to be based on each player’s single best night so far.
A week after our league meeting we also had the official Stern Army Transformers Launch Party for our women’s league. I was actually able to run a longer and more involved format than for the open launch party because of my time and schedule constraints. We did eight rounds of head-to-head match play (“max matchplay”) and a three-game finals. Unfortunately, since we had only seven people attend, the finals could only be top three. I also have started using automatic tiebreaking based on strength of field for my max matchplay tournaments in order to shorten the tournaments by avoiding a tiebreaking match if possible. That was pretty rough this time since three people were tied on points, but the auto tiebreaking put me above the cutline (uh, sorry?), probably because I had to play Tim twice. In the final match, Tim was guaranteed to win by the third game and it was really a playoff between me and Elke for second, which I managed to get. Mackenzie was the winner of the prize giveaway, the Transformers translite.
That’s the wrap up for our last couple of events. I’ll be seeing everyone for our third session shortly!
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