Today was very busy at the Sjoelen World Cup in Beneden-Leeuwen, Netherlands. We started the day with the first qualification round in the individual competition. The format for this is that each player plays 10 games of sjoelen, one on each of 10 boards – you start at a board and then move along to the end of the row and then back to the beginning until you’ve played all 10 in the row. You might start by playing or by judging and then you swap for the second half of the session.
For the UK, Bethany Burrow played first and returned a total of 1037 points. Most of her scores were around the 105 mark with a 126 on the second game, but three sub-100 scores hurt her total. In the men’s competition, James Atherton hit 914 in the first round, including a new personal high score of 108.
In the afternoon’s second round, James played first and didn’t do quite as well in the first session. Bethany also dropped a little, but still returned 1005.
These scores mean that James goes through to the men’s knockout competition in 125th place under the guaranteed place system (under which each country’s top player goes through automatically) – 128 players go through in the men’s competition.
Bethany qualified in 61st place based on her scores (64 women go through in that competition), but ended up in 60th place because of the way the guaranteed place system works.
There was barely time to breathe before the team competition started. The UK didn’t field the required five players for a team, so Bethany and James were not scheduled to play, but they were asked by the three USA representatives if they wanted to form a joint team. And so transatlantic relations got a boost when Bethany and James joined forces with Kevin, Jade and Daniel. Sadly, the team didn’t make it out of the qualifying round, but it was great to be able to participate in the team competition.
The team is looking forward to tomorrow’s individual knockout tournament, where both players will play the 20-2 system for the first time in competition.
