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WSC 2009 Commentary: Round 17

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Go to: Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5, Round 6, Round 7, Round 8, Round 9, Round 10, Round 11, Round 12, Round 13, Round 14, Round 15, Round 16, Round 17, Round 18, Round 19, Round 20, Round 21, Round 22, Round 23, Round 24.

It's the last day of the WSC preliminaries. It looks like it will take 18 wins to get to the finals, so the three players at 12-4 (Pakorn Nemitrmansuk (THA), David Boys (CAN) and Dave Wiegand (USA)) can probably make it with a 6-2 record today. Over breakfast, Pakorn joked that his personal goal was to win his first five games, to beat that old Matt Graham 13-game winning streak record from 1997, but the only major obstacle was his first round opponent: Nigel Richards (Wsc). As I write this, about ten turns each into the game, only five points separate the players at the top board.

Pakorn gets his wish, with a little luck, a lot of skill, and the usual 24:58 of his clock time. Even better for him, Boys and Wiegand lost to Nathan Benedict (USA) and Geoff Thevenot (USA), leaving Pakorn one game ahead of seven players at 12-5. (The other three are second-place Naween Fernando (AUS), Panupol Sujjayakorn (THA), Jason Katz-Brown (USA).)

We've roped off Table 1 with stanchions just in time, the crowd around the Pakorn-Nigel game was as large as a final round crowd in past years.