CAX is in July. It's only recently been getting onto hobbyists calendars but it has been on competitors calendars for a long time.

June is the Northwest show.

August is PAPA.

Sept was PPE for the last six years.

Special thanks to the janitors who kept the facility and its restrooms real clean throughout the 4 days.

Those guys deserve a medal. Maybe a purple heart.

This image from stall 2 on the right side of the men's illustrates two things:

1) The intense battle the janitors had to wage to keep the bathrooms under control.

2) How well I played in the tournament.

bustedterlet.jpg

Given the proportions of some players, I'm wondering if it was intentional or not...

The worst thing that happened in my groups was a player played out of turn... twice in two separate groups! Although, clearly they broke the rules, they were sort of drawn down the path.

In both cases, we had to play a game that was single player only. In the next game, the winner of the single-only game played first and mistakenly played player 2. Insta-DQ. The first time it happened was with Sanjay Shah. The second time was some german guy. I really felt bad for them.

I know the games are single play only in most cases to prevent lock stealing but I think lock steals are part of the strategy and player order selection.

IJ has weird ball saves and a guy in my group walked away from one.

I can't speak for PAPA, but at one of my tournaments a player did try to argue that other players alerting a walk-away player to a ball save (which subsequently caused the loss of the complaining player) should have resulted in a DQ of the alerting players. I can certainly see the rationale of it, because those alerting players were essentially spectators when not playing.

I agree, but if there's big money on the line and it's between myself and that guy, I would be a little miffed if "the crowd" or other players alerted the guy and got beat because of it. Ultimately, it IS the player's responsibility to stay till the ball is done. I dunno, it's sort of a moral grey area.

I will say this - in the past, if a player obviously didn't know the game, I would give them tips. Wow, have I gotten hosed on that (and hosed others who gave me tips). Now I do the tips after our game.

Similar thing happened two years ago at Pinburgh. A player started only a one player game. We noticed it after he drained and called for a ruling and the rule (from Bowen) was that the player plays through and then the other players play a 3-player game. I wasn't happy about it at the time but the rules are the rules.

Your particular situation is especially sucky because you played out of turn only because of someone else's screw-up.

There's a player in my area who I could totally see deliberately abuse this situation, both to get a game by himself and also in the hopes an unsuspecting player would step up and auto-DQ himself.

When I ran PPE 2011, I printed the rules out on 11x17 paper and pinned them up outside the tournament room because I knew these kinds of 'iffy' situations could happen. Several times during the tournament I had the free 'out' of saying, "the rules are posted right outside the door - you should have known better."

Yes, and as there's no practical way to police otherwise, the only fair thing is to allow it.

Our group from the bay area had a website set up to feed info into about how banks were playing from players who had already played those banks, along with basic strategy, gotchas, etc.

And I still played like crap, so there's that.

Well, you should be a nicer guy on Pinside, right? hahaha

Get in where you fit in. It was cool meeting you and glad you did alright.

Anyone in particular? hahaha.

Competing takes balls. You put your game and yourself on the line and I respect anyone who does.

I did, with disastrous results I can honestly say. But, that's just a reason to keep practicing and get better.