Subject: Masters - winning time and margin of victory

Date: Mon Dec 11 22:26:32 2017
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:
Hey calicokid - very nice performance yesterday. 54:58 is definitely a fantastic winning time and a 44:14 margin of victory has to be at or near the best (at least for the cases where multiple players at the top have the same number of wins). If I scroll back thru the last year and a half of results, I don't see anything else with a margin of victory over 35 minutes. I was hoping to post a side-by-side of time taken for each game by you, Crunch, and myself but coming back today I see both you and Crunch have played way to many games to still be in the history so that's thwarted. I'm guessing I might have had a few or a handful of individual games where I might have been faster than you were but in losing by 44 minutes you can never be sure. I know the 8x2 at the end of the Quartets sequence (7:47 total) and the 8x3 (21:46) were my two worst games so that's a big chunk out of 44:14 but it looks like you were in the zone across all of those deals. Kudos!

Date: Tue Dec 12 16:51:08 2017
User: calicokid
Message:
Thanks Kaos! I would have like to have seen a game by game comparison, that would have been interesting! I'm not recalling which games gave me the most trouble for the Master's at the moment, but I know I played my final game over and over quite a bit, I feel like it was a 6x4? I was definitely in the zone though, I can always tell when I'm rocking and rolling because I never even looked at the leader board until I hit the last game. When I'm struggling I look at the board quite a bit in the longer tournaments. I had extra motivation to play quickly as I really only had an hour to play while my wife and daughter were at a soap and candle making party ;D. Almost every Master's I play is on borrowed time, as I try not to play that late in the day on Sundays, as we try to spend that time together relaxing. It's hard though because it's really the last tournament that feels like the old days of tournament play to me.

Date: Sun Dec 24 20:03:02 2017
User: Dr.Bombay
Message:
Don't want to take anything for granted so will wait to post this... Many moons ago, the ratings committee got tired of seeing some of the longer tournaments end with over half the time to go so the degree of difficulty was bumped up. Looks like it might be time to do it again. 36:21 has to be the fastest Masters since the new format. I had to peek and managed to see three deals where I was competitive with calicokid: 7x6 32248-8 0:49 vs. 0:49 7x4 32248-8 1:39 vs. 1:12 7x5 16916-11 1:45(2) vs. 1:22(1) ck has the times in the first column. With most of his wins in one try under one minute, it wasn't too hard to search for the deals where I might have been close.

Date: Sat Dec 30 16:12:19 2017
User: calicokid
Message:
It would be cool to see the difficulty of the Master's bumped up a bit. Looks like to me most of them can be finished in an hour, maybe an hour and a half at most.