This year the tournament was back to "only" 12 teams and the quadruple round robin, which gives the underdogs more chances of winning at least one point against one of the top teams. And well, everyone was a clear underdog when playing either Quirinius Van Dorp and Marten Wortel (Cranith-wortel), Philippe Morath and Jochem Snuverink (zola-Ishamael) or Maarten Aronsson and Martin Werner (Firefly-ludeo). A curiosity was Sergiy Vasylkevych's (fermy's) three-headed team, where players alternated playing and the third player was allowed to act as a intervening coach. This was of course because we found ourselves an odd number of players.
Since we were again to play semi-finals and finals, the first battle revolved around the fourth place. One round before the end, Laurent Bartholdi and me (bartholdi-nabla) were two points clear of the French team of Lionel Belin and Matthias Carno (clanelle-pagloppaglop), and three points clear of Rodolphe Francey and Alexeï Komonov (Tjeulesbetes-Comonova). That sounded pretty good until we got cleanly wiped 4-0 by Tjeulesbetes-Comonova, who still didn't make it to the top four since the French scored an easy 4-0 against a lower ranked team (Vincent Berger and Eelse-Jan Stutvoet).
The semi-finals were played in four total games, with the best ranked team in the regular tournament going through in case of a tie. This actually happened in the most suspenseful match, zola-Ishamael against Firefly-ludeo. The latter team was leading 2-1 and also took the first edge in the last game, but zola and Ishamael are really tough nuts to crack, were able to rescue the game and win the match altogether. Meanwhile the favourites Cranith and wortel did not suffer too much in their own semi-final. Neither have there been too much doubt about the final match (eight games), that they won on a very convincing 4-1 score.
Following : Sunday and Monday at the Parc des Bastions