Well, yesterday was an absolutely fantastic day. A big thank you to all the 30 contestants who took part, including Player X, who I might as well reveal now, is my mum, who replaced Steve Ball at the last minute.
The first 3 15-rounders were very well fought out. We also had some very high scores, with both Kirk and Dan scoring 134 in their first game.
After all the 15-rounders, we had 6 players with 3 wins out of 3. They were Ryan Taylor, Dan McColm, Kirk Bevins, Joseph Krol, Graeme Cole and debutant Tracey Mills. And the highest two 2/3 winners were Matt Bayfield (who performed remarkably well considering he was under the weather for most of the day) and Dylan Taylor, who squeezed out Richard Priest by just 2 points.
The quarter-finals, saw the #1 seed, Ryan Taylor, lose to his namesake, the #8 seed, Dylan Taylor, by a single point. Dylan joined Kirk, Dan and Graeme in the semis.
The tightly-fought semis saw Kirk defeat Graeme and Dan defeat Dylan. Graeme would then defeat Dylan to win 3rd place. In the other groups, Jack Worsley beat Andy McGurn in the Group B final, Andy Platt beat Phil Jarvis in Group C and Michelle Nevitt beat Roger Edwards in Group D.
So, the grand final took place between Kirk and Dan. After a stalemate in the first 4 rounds, Kirk hit another gear in winning 3 out of the next 4 rounds, including getting the first conundum, CIGARILLO, as well as the brilliant 8's of BOROUGHS and TOSTADOS.
Then in the last letters game, Dan pulled out a trump card by spotting the brilliant LAAITIE to cut the gap to 19 points, with just the last numbers and conundrum to go. Unfortunately for him, Kirk had the pick and an easy 1 large appeared. But, Kirk's hopes of a century were dashed thanks to the final conundrum, DIAERESIS, meaning that Kirk won the final by a score of 98-79.
May I just say that everyone who came yesterday made the day absolutely magical, it was a completely new experience to be a host, and while I missed being a contestant, it was thrilling being in charge. It was also brilliant meeting so many new people for the first time (we had TWELVE CO-event débutantes), and I hope that we can reconvene next year for COHUD2.
P.S. No-one mention MOFOS again.
