Early leaders emerge in the E-Decamind
1 March 2001

The gargantuan E-Decamind contest is approaching a crucial half-way point which will distinguish the title challengers from the mere contenders.

Each of the sixteen component games-by-e-mail tournaments has been organised as a two-stage process. In the first stage, each contestant plays games against four opponents to produce a preliminary score. The top five (sometimes four, sometimes six) players from the first stage then qualify to play a round-robin amongst themselves to determine the top placings in that tournament. All those who miss the cut have their overall score for that event based on their first stage play alone.

Eight of the 16 tournaments have reached the end of the first stage, so we now know the identities of the top five finishers for Abalone, Amazons, Ataxx, Backgammon, Darkchess, 9x9 Go, Trax and Wari. The first stages of the other eight tournaments - Gravity, Hex, LoA, MaxCheckers, Neutron, Pente, ROthello and Twixt - will be over soon.

However, we can spot patterns of excellence emerging; there seem to be five early favourites among the twenty contest entrants. Marco Conte from Italy, who plays under the ID Marconte, only entered five of the eight earliest tournaments, but has made the grade in all of them - impressive consistency.

Bernhard Herwig from Germany entered all eight of the earliest tournaments (in fact, he entered all 16!) and has managed to beat the cut in seven of them! The only game to which his incredible versatility does not extend is Amazons - and even then he scored a very credible 2/4 in the first round, narrowly missing qualification.

Pedro - Italy's Pietro Rossi - is also building up a very useful score with five qualifications from seven tournaments. Sweden's Carl Johan Ragnarsson has four top placements out of seven. Don Banks four out of six makes him the best of the five US entrants so far with.

It would be wrong to dismiss the other 15 altogether, though - it looks like there are some players who will score much more highly in the eight later tournaments than they have done in the first eight.

The first stages of the other eight tournaments have a tight deadline - in just two or three weeks time we'll know the finalists across the board. There's an impressive line-up of mind sports talent playing in the E-Decamind; we'd like to see you all in person at a Mind Sports Olympiad some day!