Vienna International MineSweeper Meeting 2005

On Saturday the 13th of August the Vienna International MineSweeper Meeting took place at the faculty of mathematics of the University of Vienna. Whereas I was the organizer I had plenty to do to set up everything for the tourny. And I was pretty suprised that already on Tuesday all preperations seemed to be done.
On Wednesday mornig (I was just testing if all accounts were working) Oli Scheer und Robert Benditz suddenly entered the PC-Lab: "Wir suchen den Christoph Marx." (We're looking for Christoph Marx)
So I showed them the location and we chated a lot. And played a bit MineSweeper. Robert tried the microsoft version and after five minutes of play the suddenly cried: "Ich hab 'ne 13!" (I've got a 13!). Oli and I raced over to him to see that he completed a dreamboard with one mine shifted from the upper right to the bottom left corner area.
Later we ate Pizza at a neareby Pizzeria together with Thérèse (one of the judges).
Late in the evening I finished the system test, and thought that everything would work wonderfully. I should have recognized that such thoughts are always the beginning of a desaster.
Thursday afternoon Robert sent me a short message, they had bought Pizza, not recognizing that there's no stove to bake it in their hostel. So we me met at my place and ate Pizza (again). We wondered if Jon was already in vienna and how we could probably find him. I wrote him a mail but it didn't reach him cause he was just on his way to the airport (as I later discovered). We talked about the arrival of the other players and decided to meet them at the trainstation Friday evening.
Friday afternoon we met again at the PC-Labs. We wanted to try if we could install Roberts mousedrivers. But it turned out that we would need one of the administrators for it. So I went to their room but they were already in their weekend. When I came back I had to discover that an automatical system update had started. And the next thing that happend was that nothing worked any more. Yeah, that's what you need one day befor the event: desasters.
The rest of the afternoon I spent with searching errors. I emulated the system on my laptop, so I could continue with the troubleshouting while waiting at the trainstation.
The first to arrive was Gero Wälz form Ingolstadt, Germany. We visited Oli and Robert at their hostel which was fortunatly very close to the station. We ate some nudles and I continued working on my laptop.
The second to arrive was Nagy Gergely. All together we walked down the Mariahilferstraße and found a nice icecream-house were we stayed for an hour. Than we returned to the station to meet Stephan Bechtel. Stephan, Gergely and Gero didn't stay in a hostel but at my place. So I guided them there but instead sleeping I went to the university to eliminate some more bugs. Around 3 o'clock I decided that only minor bugs were remaining and that I'm just too tired to fix them all. So I chatched some three hours of sleep.
Than Saturday had arrived and the event was going to take place. And we were missing Jon Simonsen. The schedule didn't leave us plenty of time so we had to start the NonoSweeper session without him. He arrived more than half an hour late but that wasn't an obsticle to play much better scores than I did. Oli and Robert also arrived during the NonoSweeper session and watched us playing.
Befor we started the MineSweeper event we had a break to chat, eat some cookies and drink some juice. And I found time to set up the beamer to diplay the results automatically.
In the intermediate session I couldn't focus on playing. I didn't score a single sub20 and ended up in 7th place. That was the worst rank I had fancied for that session. Oli played impressive stuff. He got tons of sub20s and finished even one game more than I did (if you look at the result of Budapest that wasn't too likely to happen). Gero scored a 17 what will bring him to rank 5 in the intermediate meeting ranking.
We took a 30 mins break and enjoyed again the buffet that Thérèse and Martina had prepared.
The expert session was - how to say - cool. But I felt so stupid afterwards. I was only one click away from the second place in the session but managed to hit a mine and so I gifted the rank to Robert. But never mind, the session was great for me and befor the meeting I had no hope to reach rank 3.
The overall session was likely to get very tight, of course not for the win but for ranks 2-7. Early in the session I got two 73s which made me hope to come close to Robert and keep Gergely on distance. The gap to Robert closed down to less than 10 secs but then he started to score some sub70 in a row. I was tired from the short night and didn't feel able to finish an single futher expert board. So I switched to intermediate and finished three boards just to have finished more than Oli in the end.. hehe. But than I recognized that Gergely came very close. So I played expert again but not to good. In the end I was lucky to defend the third place.
After the winner honour (everyone got a T-Shirt and a reminder) we visited the restaurant Centimeter. We talked about tons of different things and solved some riddles.
Later we played some Bowling. Oli and Gergely played some good rounds they both scored 160+. In the end I was really tired. Just needed my bed.
On Sunday Gero, Stephan and Jon did some sightseeing while Bernhard and I (as usual) played some snooker. Sunday was also the day to depart for everyone but Jon. He stayed till Tuesday morning. On Monday we had a look to an event about videogames. It was nice but couldn't keep me interessted for too long. But Jon stayed there the whole afternoon.

from left to right: Gero Wälz, Bernhard Hölzl, Stephan Bechtel, Oliver Scheer, Robert Benditz, Christoph Marx, Nagy Gergely, Jon Simonsen