The Buzz

As I sit here typing I am impatient.  Impatient to play, impatient to see my friends, impatient to move and get on with it.  It’s not anticipation, it’s impatience.  It’s at this time I have to calm down, conserve energy, stay focused, eat, and enjoy that tingling sensation of knowing that something great is about to happen.

There’s a great unknown ahead but that comes from playing with Too Bad.  With a changing roster each tournament has a different feel.  Tournament life is about adaptation rather than repetition.  Fundamentals help but finding someone to click with is far more important.  Fitting in rather than being the hero is the lesson of each day.

Rahil and I chatted last night about Mixed and which teams may make the finals.  We both feel that TFP will be in the finals (as does the rest of the world including Steven Trainor) and also suspect that Liquid will make it in.  In a conversation last week with Lenny Scott (one of the Liquid captains last year) I told him that I gave Liquid a 70% chance of getting to the finals, I’d like to raise that to 80% now.  Rahil pointed out that the 70% was probably too low considering that Liquid’s close loss to ONYX was unlikely to be close or a loss the next time around.  Rahil pointed out that ONYX had picked up star lady player and that Liquid had lost Blue (Dan Yanke) when Liquid was leading 4-1.  Statistical imagination leads one to conjecture a finals appearance by Liquid.

Can anyone ruin the party?  I think not.  Both teams have (as Trainor pointed out) confidence.  Liquid is has young players that are trained well by the veterans that know how to play them.  TFP is a young team full of veterans that know exactly how to instill fear.  So who’ll cause pains for both of these teams?  My choices are Psychoplastique, ONYX, RIP, and MONSTER.  Tundra should perhaps also be added to that list as their form has improved greatly in the last month.  Just imagining the aforementioned teams in the top eight makes me impatient.

Then my thoughts wander a bit farther.  Should Liquid finish top 4 would that be an extra seed for Ontario next year?  Liquid will continue to be strong which suggests that going into 2011 Ontario may have as many as 8 Mixed bids to Nationals but are quite likely to have 7.

One step at a time.

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