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Dominion tournaments!
Jul. 2nd, 2012 07:32 amSo ... this weekend I played in a Dominion tournament. I played a 4p game, against one extremely good player, one quite good player, and one decent player. I was in the low end, in terms of rating; not completely out of the running, but likely to win one game, if any.
I won all four.
I literally spent half an hour going, "what the hell just happened? what the hell?" I beat a player ranked 42 four times in a row.
I ... was more than a little bit stunned. To be fair, I had some awesome luck; to start off, none of the spreads had devastating attack cards, which favored me greatly, as I hate those cards. So, I had a lot of experience with the cards and the best players didn't buy many of the attack cards that were available (i.e., Fortune Teller). And then I also had other types of luck: for instance, in two games, other players could have ended the game but didn't because they either would have lost the game or tied (with me!), and I managed to get to 8 in time to buy the last Province—obviously I played well, but I also got lucky. It wasn't that I necessarily that I had good shuffle luck, or always got 8 and never 7 or 9; but that my opponents didn't end the game because they just happened to have a tying score, that sort of thing. Subtle, but somehow it ended adding up to me having four wins. Yay!! It was awesome, I must admit, even though I didn't really deserve to play in the semis!
On the other hand, when I played in the semis, I got crushed. :P Not that it was unexpected; and I certainly learned a lot. I also shouldn't have been crushed quite so much—there was a mix-up with turn order that resulted in me playing 4th position twice, and another player in 3rd position twice; but, neither of us had any chance of moving on in the tournament, so we all agreed that it didn't matter. That mix-up resulted in changing the results of the last game we played, such that I would have done slightly better than I did; but I still would have been a distant last.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I got to play even though I didn't have any hope of going on to the finals! I will certainly look over the logs for the final match, though. Maybe next year ...
In other news, I went to Boston to see the tall ship show. I almost didn't get to see it, because I thought I remembered from two years ago that the docks were all swarming with people and that it was really obvious that there was an event going on. But this time, there wasn't anything anywhere until the fish docks, and there weren't tons of people, so I got really confused. But! I got to see a ship from Ecuador, one from Brazil, and one from Indonesia. I didn't go on the Colombian ship because it was extremely crowded. :P The one from Brazil was probably the coolest, although the Ecuadorian one had pirates on it, so.
That's about it. Back to obsessive counting! And I'm going to try to find out if I can apply for an NSF grant to fund my research next year—someone in my house did that for the summer, so I'm going to ask her how/what she did.
I won all four.
I literally spent half an hour going, "what the hell just happened? what the hell?" I beat a player ranked 42 four times in a row.
I ... was more than a little bit stunned. To be fair, I had some awesome luck; to start off, none of the spreads had devastating attack cards, which favored me greatly, as I hate those cards. So, I had a lot of experience with the cards and the best players didn't buy many of the attack cards that were available (i.e., Fortune Teller). And then I also had other types of luck: for instance, in two games, other players could have ended the game but didn't because they either would have lost the game or tied (with me!), and I managed to get to 8 in time to buy the last Province—obviously I played well, but I also got lucky. It wasn't that I necessarily that I had good shuffle luck, or always got 8 and never 7 or 9; but that my opponents didn't end the game because they just happened to have a tying score, that sort of thing. Subtle, but somehow it ended adding up to me having four wins. Yay!! It was awesome, I must admit, even though I didn't really deserve to play in the semis!
On the other hand, when I played in the semis, I got crushed. :P Not that it was unexpected; and I certainly learned a lot. I also shouldn't have been crushed quite so much—there was a mix-up with turn order that resulted in me playing 4th position twice, and another player in 3rd position twice; but, neither of us had any chance of moving on in the tournament, so we all agreed that it didn't matter. That mix-up resulted in changing the results of the last game we played, such that I would have done slightly better than I did; but I still would have been a distant last.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I got to play even though I didn't have any hope of going on to the finals! I will certainly look over the logs for the final match, though. Maybe next year ...
In other news, I went to Boston to see the tall ship show. I almost didn't get to see it, because I thought I remembered from two years ago that the docks were all swarming with people and that it was really obvious that there was an event going on. But this time, there wasn't anything anywhere until the fish docks, and there weren't tons of people, so I got really confused. But! I got to see a ship from Ecuador, one from Brazil, and one from Indonesia. I didn't go on the Colombian ship because it was extremely crowded. :P The one from Brazil was probably the coolest, although the Ecuadorian one had pirates on it, so.
That's about it. Back to obsessive counting! And I'm going to try to find out if I can apply for an NSF grant to fund my research next year—someone in my house did that for the summer, so I'm going to ask her how/what she did.
