Jay's View
REPORT ON PLAY FROM WEDNESDAY, March 26, 2025
The focus on what I write every week might have a side story or theme but in the end it’s all about backgammon at our club in Winnetka. So far this year I’ve ranted about our weather, welcomed a few new players to the club (including Michael Stellman this week), and of course, our club hosting and winning the 2025 Challenge Cup. And I will get to results from last night’s play in a moment but first I want to offer well wishes for much success to the players on the men’s and women’s teams representing the United States in the upcoming 2025 Team World Championship tournament in Greece in April from the 7th to the 13th. I’ll always cheer for team USA (thank you, USA 1980 Olympic gold medal hockey team) but aside from the patriotic motivation for cheer for them, there is two players from our club that will be playing in the tournament. Playing on the men’s team is one of our club’s stalwarts, Craig Anderson and on the women’s team, Wendy Kaplan who comes to play a few times a year. We already know that Craig and Wendy are very strong players and will both hopefully find success as a representatives of Team USA. But c’mon, don’t you agree that it’s kind of cool that someone from your club is on such a prestigious team as this? Join me in wishing the following players success in the tournament:
NATIONAL TEAM — Joe Russell (captain), Bob Wachtel, Craig Anderson, David Stein, Jim Thinnsen, Mark Ferrin, Petko Kostadinov, Roberto Litzenberger
WOMEN’S TEAM — Karen Davis (captain), Antoinette Marie Williams, Irina Litzenberger, Kara Schultz, Leyla Zaloutskaya, Wendy Kaplan
Now, as for last night . . .
As briefly noted earlier, we welcomed Michael Stellman to the club for his first tournament play ever. Michael won one match and then lost his second, actually not a bad start considering that his win was against an always strong, Bob Kamp. In fact, that very same Bob Kamp won his three matches in the Consolation bracket and won the final match against Larry Goldstein, taking first place in the bracket. Bob earned enough master points to move up one notch in the standings. As for Michael and Larry, I hope they’ll come to the club more often in the coming weeks.
And in the Main bracket . . . how about that Carter Mattig? He played in the final match of the Main bracket for the second week in a row. Last week he lost in a closely contested match against Alex Owen. But this week, he crushed a game but outgunned Bill Chibnik to take first place. Each player earned enough to substantially move up in the club standings, with Carter moving from 11th to 6th and Bill moving uo from 21st to 16th. Not a bad night’s work.
But now we move to the month of April. All kinds of good stuff happening in April, with people celebrating the Easter and Passover holidays, the start of the new baseball season, the end of the NCAA basketball tournaments and, what we hope will be a change in our weather that will transition us to some nice spring skies and temperatures. Stay tuned for how all that turns out. In the meantime, have a great weekend, everyone!
Jay