Budapest MineSweeper Tournament 2006

Friday

I arrived at Budapest-Keleti at half past 6pm. Gergely picked me up at the trainstation from where we went to the hotel strait away. There we met Gero, Jan and Robert and so I finally got to know the persons behind the nicknames Maruda and Nikolaj which are quite famous in terms of nonosweeper.
I shared a room with Roman which was two levels below (so I carried all my loggage upstairs for perfectly no reason). All of us chated a bit and I reported about my meeting with Daniel in Leipzig and about the nice compatition we played there. Gero liked the idea and so we played with nearly the same rules. The main difference was that we now had two laptops available so that we could play simultaniously. We played first-to-10-beginner legs but scored awful times at the beginning. I didn't feel comfortably and we both were nervous. After five legs Gero led by 3:2 and that was the stage where my hand started to feel really smooth. I took ten legs in a row and won a first-to-6-intermediate leg in between. After that Gero gave up but we continued playing legs for fun and to try to achieve good times. The best was my 68 sec beginner leg - that is fast if you think about it.
Also Roman and I tried some games. I beat him on beginner but on intermediate we tied. Since I usually finish extremly many games this already made me think that Roman could be very dangerous at the tourny.
We spent the rest of the evening with watching hockey and a little chating and went then to bed to be fit for the next day.

Saturday

Due to a leck of time I came to the NonoSweeper session without breakfast. But I wouldn't have had any chance to compete with the division 1 players anyway and also Gergely was far out of range. But the fight on the first two ranks was extraordinary. In the end there were only 5 secs in the game, and they favoured Gero.
After I finished my five intermediate and expert games, I stoped playing. I was perfectly save from behind and had no chance to fight forward. So I searched breakfast instead and found it at Burger King.
When I came back, the session was over and I had time to put the results imediately online.
We had to wait a bit with the international MineSweeper session because Damien was a little late. But unfortuneatly the schedule didn't allow us to wait also for István who could have competed for rank 7. The big favourits were Damien and Roman but one could also expect a lot of Gyula. The suprise guest was Gabriel the Tarragon who made all the way from France. Gero like me was in good shape the weeks before the Tourny and Gergely himself was also expected to play some strong scores.
Already in the international session Roman made clear that he was the man to beat. Damien struggled with his mouse and also all the others played a lot weeker than expected. Only Gero and I did acceptable with a 60-19 and a 65-21. But Gergely and Gabriel played far away from what we expected.
So everything was possible for the compatition and I had even the slight hope to come close to Gyula.
But then the main session started and it's biggest upset was that there were no upsets. As expected Roman played extremly strong. He played a 50.57 which will put him in front of Oli in the Expert-Tournament ranking (as soon as I find time to update it). He ended up as the winner 26 secs clear of Damien who was a bit disappointed because the problems with his mouse kept him away from coming closer to Roman - but even if, I doubt that Roman would have been beatable on that day.
Gyula also played a good session but couldn't take advantage of Damiens struggle, so he ended up 11 secs behind him.
11 seconds is the same gap that kept me away from reaching my target: rank 4. I lost it with some on last click lost good sub70s and especially with an estimated 61 which I lost without any guesses left after 49 secs.
However, it wasn't me to be the most unlucky. In the game between Gero and Gabriel were only 0.9 secs. What an unbeliveable tight decision! So it was Gabriel to take rank 4. He took this rank with the remarkable total of 521,83. That's not remarkable good or remarkable bad, but it's exactly the same total that Robert achieved in Vienna.
The Hungerian section brought a little upset dough. Of course noone could come close to Gyula, but István stole rank two from Gergely.
We had a very nice winner honour: Gergely even managed to organize cups for the first three!
Afterwards time was unfortuneately to short such that I couldn't put the results online right away.

The first way after the tourny lead us to Burger King (where else could it have been?). But we didn't play there too much, so no new entries for the Burger King ranking.
We spent the evening with Bowling and I have to confess that I played very very bad. Neither of us played really good scores, only Gergely did a solid 166 - two points better than he did in Vienna and one point better than Oli did there, we're waiting for the revanche this summer.

Sunday

The weather wasn't too inviting. So we stayed at the hotel most of the day and played First to sessions. Damien and I played some beginner legs, most of which I won. Later on we played some interessting four-player-legs. It were Damien, Roman, Robert and me to compete. The first leg brought the upset: It ended Robert-me-Roman-Damien. What a suprise. We played two more legs and both Damien and I won with tied scores (we meassured only for secs).
Roman then left the compatition. We played a bit on and in the end Damien and I played a 1-exp-leg which I won.
But Damien took revanche: While I was away to get us some lunch from McDonalds he broke the intermediate record on my Computer. Of course I had to try hard to fight back. Damien and Yvonne (Damiens girlfriend) went out and left Roman and me in front of our laptops. I played on and on but couldn't come close to Damiens 16. Well, I decided to have a break and programmed a litte for my new version of ViennaSweeper in which I wanted to remove the two known bugs. After some minutes it bored me and played a bit on my old version. I intended to have a little training on efficience (ViennaSweeper shows after the game the unused flags). And then suddenly I got a 16.64! Roman was sitting beside me and witnessed it. It was a very nice 3bv=39 board and the only thing that annoyed me was that it wasn't done on clone.
Anyway, Gero the Farniks, Roman and later also Damien watched the vid and had all the oppinion it should be accepted as my new record. I didn't beat Damiens 16, but still for me the weekend was very successful evendough I didn't reached rank 4.
We all sat together in Romans room for a while and chatted a bit. Gero and the Farniks had some good ideas for the NonoSweeper section of the next tournament in Vienna. And we all are looking forward to meet there again only Roman already kwons that he will have a lot of work arround then.
I said good bye and left at 8pm - to wait long at the trainstation since my train was half an hour late.