Hex championship

Yeah baby! :thumbup1:

Well, I didn’t exactly win, and it was only third league, but I am satisfied. I finished second in hex.ch.13.3.3, which means advancing to second league.

The key game was against Jose Ma Grau Ribas. (in case you still don’t know, in hex each player tries to connect his sides of the board – very simple) I started horribly, it almost couldn’t hve been worse. I was seriously thinking about resigning around moves 12 and 20 :crying:(you can click on the numbers to see the moves). Move nr 22 was just desperate, but it somehow turned out well. Then my opponent made a serious mistake in move 31 (yah, he thought he was being clever :smartass:), then I am happy about my move 32, although it looks stupid, it covers several threats simultaneously. I don’t know when I first realised that I was going to win the game, 32 felt good but it was all unsure back then. I was sure of my win when playing 42. 8) The sequence to 59 is one of the very few totally forced sequences that there were – all leading to safe connection. Had I lost this game, I’d stay in third league, winning enabled me to advance and I also gained some cool rating points (now I have 1800, which is rather neat). Omg this was a long paragraph… I just really wonder whether anyone will actually go through the game… (as I said, rules of hex are easy (and it’s a very cool game)).

One thing worth mentioning is that this championship was “consistent”, eg. if you look at the results, you can see all the wins are above the diagonal and all the losses below it. This is probably rather rare, for example current twixt.ch.12.1.1 (yeah, I’m in the first league :-)) is all messed up (it’s partly because of me, as I’ve beaten Klaus ‘TwixT god’ Hussmans (it was a fast game, like most games with Klaus… but this one had different result than most :P) as well as NieWiesz (Polish prodigy) and lost most other games against relatively weaker players (not necessarily weaker than me, but weaker than Klaus).

Geez, I start writing about hex championship, then longishly analyze one hex game and then switch to bragging about beating Klaus… :|