The fourth annual e-mail Lines of Action (LOA) tournament has just finished. This was a very
strong event indeed. The 26 entrants included the current World Champion Fred Kok and the 1998 World
Champion Hartmut Thordsen as well as Ragnar Wikman who was World Championship runner-up in 1997 and 1998.
Sure enough, Kok, Thordsen and Wikman were among the 8 players who qualified for the
final round robin stage. However, none of them managed to finish in the top two places.
The champion and runner-up positions were taken by two newcomers, Jorge Gómez Arrausi and Kerry Handscomb.
Both these players finished with scores of 7-1, but Arrausi won his game against Handscomb and is the champion.
Jorge Gómez Arrausi is a 22-year old maths student from Basuri, near Bilbao.
He started playing Lines of Action in 1998. As well as playing the game, he is interested
in puzzles like finding the shortest possible LOA game. He also likes playing Go, chess, Hex and Twixt.
Kerry Handscomb is originally from England. He moved to Japan in 1985, returned
to England in 1989 and then moved to Vancouver in 1994. Although this was his first
appearance in the annual e-mail tournament, he has played Lines of Action before in the
correspondence tournaments organised by NOST (Knights of the Square Table). He has worked in the magazine industry
in Vancouver for six years, and now he and his wife Connie publish the magazine
Abstract Games. The first issue was very well received, and issue 2 is due to come out later this month.
Kerry is writing a series of articles on Lines of Action strategy for the magazine. If you want to find out
more about this excellent publication, check out the Abstract Games Web site.
Here are the scores of the top six players in the tournament:
|
Position |
Player |
Country |
Score |
| 1st |
Jorge Gómez Arrausi |
Spain |
6-1 |
| 2nd |
Kerry Handscomb |
Canada |
6-1 |
| 3rd |
Hartmut Thordsen |
Germany |
5-2 |
| 4th/5th |
Dave Dyer |
U.S.A. |
4-3 |
| 4th/5th |
Ragnar Wikman |
Finland |
4-3 |
| 6th |
Fred Kok |
Netherlands |
2-5 |
For full details of the tournament, look at Dave Dyer's
LOA Home Page.
On this very good site you will find crosstables of the preliminary and final groups,
as well as Java-viewable game records of all the games played.
On the same site you can find full details of the previous annual e-mail tournaments,
including many commented games. There is also other information about LOA, such as results
from the World Championship tournaments held at the MSO for the last three years.
Thanks to Dave Dyer, Jorge Gómez Arrausi and Kerry Handscomb for the above information.
