WORLD CUP CHALLENGE & GIANT JACKPOT

Warning: Do NOT play Winslow a 25-point match. At some point you will stop scoring points.
 
For example the following. Until this moment Grandell had been amazing. He had won this Giant Jackpot last year, not to mention the World Championship! Perhaps he was remembering the only other time we had played, the finals of a jackpot in Copenhagen a couple years ago. He won an 8-cube game, probably thought the match (to 9) was over. At 8-8 he made his best move, offering to hedge (which I accepted, though I hadn't seen any reason to). And this time...

  R/16 EW-Jerry Grandell 
1-0 1-1 1-3 2-3 2-4 3-4 5-4 6-4 10-4 14-4 15-4 16-4 17-4 18-4 22-4 23-4 23-6 25-6

Eleven games in a row. Hmm, must have gotten him mad. No wonder he won the main. 
 
 
Then the following match (against perhaps the best Turkish player):

   R/8 EW-Ekrem Basdas 
0-1 0-3 0-5 1-5 1-7 3-7 5-7 7-7 8-7 8-8 8-12 12-12 14-12 16-12 18-12 19-12 20-12 22-12 25-12

His reaction was rather strong at first, but he showed himself to be a nice fellow as the week went on. But hey, these guys take the game seriously! 
 
  
And then the money round (note the revenge factor: I'd lost to him in the semis in Las Vegas last November!): 

   R/4 EW-Doug Mayfield 
1-0 3-0 4-0 5-0 7-0 7-4 8-4 9-4 10-4 12-4 13-4 14-4 15-4 16-4 16-8 16-9 17-9 18-9 20-9 22-9 23-9 23-11 25-11

Streakers.
  Meanwhile former World Champion and MOTW (Man Of The World) Mike Svobodny and German player, analyst and author/editor Harold Johanni had an extremely close match, all the way to DMP (Double Match Point). If I had any interest in this one, I couldn't get in to see it! The crowd in the Mozart Restaurant was just too thick. And in the final game, a truly "bazaar" incident occured, which caused the game to be suspended for hours while tournament director Abraham Eitan and the tournament committee of Mike Senkiewicz, Chris Ternel and Kent Goulding tried to make sense out of chaos.
More later, for now note that Johanni prevailed, and days later he showed the correct strategy (lose fast in the Main, so you don't wear yourself out) and beat me in the finals as well.

Pictures?

I'll get around to some sort of indexing and commenting of the hundreds of pictures soon -- Hey, I'm on a roll! But give me a break, I need some time out to play! (I'm on my way to Florida for the Pro-Am...)