Everything #2

Not Recently

Chain entered last week's Worlds tournament as the top seed. Our schedule has us start out against Loquitos, a Japanese team (but not the famous Buzz Bullets from Japan). I happened to start the game with a pretty big sky... though to be fair I was a foot taller than the guy. And we were rolling. We cruised through our second game against Latvia and bested our third opponent, Magon, 17-7. The restof day two was spent (for Joel and Asa especially) working on laundry and related bull shit. The unhelpfulness of

local staff was hard to get used to - and came back into play when I was at the airport a few later... though that's another story. Here's a cheery picture of what took too many hours and lots of sweat to get to.

After day two, for all you format inquirers, Chain was reseeded into a 6-team power pool. We would play five games over 2 and a half days; top two teams in each power pool then place into quarters. It just so happened that the 1 and 2 seeds in the power pool played in the first power pool round. So early Tuesday morning, we met regional rival Doublewide from Austin, TX. In the second half of this game, we looked to be playing like a top seed - Doublewide scored 3 or 4 in the second half to our 8 or 9. Satisfying win. Plus we got to watch immediately following Revolver play Sockeye, another US regional matchup (and, as it turned out, a precursor of the Worlds finals).

Then, afternoon games were rained out (many jokes were made about "chain lightning," which there was a lot of) - so we played cards, drank beers, ate delicious Czech food for a couple hours. This the clouds cleared up. I believe this was the day where Dylan drew Zip as part of Five Ultimate's "draw your captain" whiteboard area. Here's a pretty good shot of it:

I used the afternoon as my first day of sightseeing around Central Prague. Its worth mentioning that I had become pretty disenchanted with the tournament's organization and my lack of free time (kind of opposed feelings, I admit). So the time alone was very welcome. I even got to practice Arabic at the cafe (this is somewhat documented in my earlier post on my blog and the post I wrote on The Huddle - though I finished that one on Thursday, out of sync with the chronology of the current post).

We had our closest pool play game against FreeSpeed from Switzerland - I don't know how they didn't win a single game in the power pool. We handled Mephisto from Canada and the two Swedish teams at the tournament. Score cards from each game are available by clicking on Game Play next to the list of games below our roster here. From here, we were propelled, after the power pool games, into quarters on Thursday afternoon against Invictus. We had good reason to be nervous, considering they had some Furious George pick-ups. Great throwers and good cutters. But nothing to match our defense, which like the Doublewide game, wore down the opponents and basically stayed on the field in the second half.

There's so much I'm missing - some of which the photo albums I put on facebook portray and much of which it can't either. But here are two shots from Chain guys enjoying a) the world cup at strahov's main social area/tents and b) card playing in the hallway of building 9