Curiosities Round of 16

WTCOC Curiosities by JinaJina, szigfrid, manarori, and Mingo

Curiosities Round of 16
(week 6)

• The first week of the playoffs consisted of 100 games in 40 duels
  • 20 duels had 2 games (40 games total)
  • 20 duels had 3 games (60 games total)
  • It was a week of exciting matches, with 7 out of 8 ending 3-2.
• Manarori (Mex) obtained this week’s highest winning score (133 points), but it was his *other* game that resulted in this week’s highest *combined* score with 253 points.
• Japan’s 80RThiA achieved this week’s lowest winning score (64 points)
• Two games were lost by running out of time, and one of these occasions was extremely painful for the title defending Chinese team. After losing the first game of the duel, mitaocat needed to win the second one to keep China’s chances alive vs Portugal. It looked like he was going to be the winner, but he ran out of time  on his penultimate turn (0:00 seconds remaining), and China was eliminated.
• Two games, LazyBore (UK) vs TanyaU (Ukr) and TerranPL (Pol) vs NataSa23 (Tut), ended with draws this week, with the UK and Poland winning the tiebreakers. Yes…Poland again. They are the first team to have 5 draws this year, and have amazingly won all of them! Terran_PL won 3 three of them himself.
• TerranPL almost tied again in his 2nd game this week, but apparently he decided to change things up a bit, and win the game decisively…by one point! 
• In contrast to his teammate’s pattern of winning close games, UY_Scuti lost 5 games this year, and 4 of them by only one point. His only loss by more than one point was against manarori, so (quoting TerranPL) “manarori proved to have superpowers, so it doesnt count I guess.” 😉
• Three of UY_Scuti’s losses were also the first game in a duel, but in spite of all those discouraging starts, UY_Scut still managed to win 5 of his 6 duels this year!
• If you are a Carcassonne World Champion, you really don’t want to get Manarori (Mex) as an opponent. By beating Someone_you_know this week, Marco is the first player to win WTCOC duels against 3 different World Champions (having already defeated Mars15 in 2023 and UY_Scuti this year in week 3). 
• Two world champion runner-ups faced each other this week in a remarkable match between Taiwan and Latvia. Alexey_LV (Lat) and HotlyHotly (Twn) both had exceptional group stage performances this year, winning all 5 of their duels (and losing only 0 and 1 games, respectively).  
• Alexey won the duel, although he accumulated one loss in the process, and became the only player to win 6 wins out of 6 duels. Alas, Latvia lost the match against Taiwan, so we won’t be able to congratulate anyone with a 7/7 in the quarterfinals.
• Despite the end of HotlyHotly’s winning streak, Taiwan qualified for the quarter finals for the first time, and they remain undefeated this year!
• Taiwan and the UK were the only Group Stage winners to survive this round, which also means that previously unbeaten teams China, Czechia and RCP were eliminated.
• Among the 8 quarterfinalists, Japan (three time champion) is the only team to have previously finished a year in the top 3. Moreover, the top 5 teams of last year’s WTCOC have already been eliminated.
• Three of the teams continuing to the next round placed 3rd in their groups: Hungary, Portugal, and Mexico.
• Three teams come from group E: Taiwan, Tutejšyja, and Portugal.
• Hungary, Mexico, Taiwan and Tutejšyja will all appear in the quarter finals for the first time.

Feature Records:

• Japan’s 80RThiA scored a 15 point road at table #517193889 on turn 141
• DoNotWasteMyTime (RCP) and pchan19 (Mex) jointly scored a 36 point city at table #517434345 on turn 88
• Wallaceprime (UK) scored a 33 point field scored at table #515868601
• Eter (Hun) scored 43 monastery points at table #517488758 (3 complete and 2 incomplete monasteries)

Geographical Curiosities:

• In order to expand on some curiosities we’ve reported in previous weeks, we decided to find out which teams have players in multiple time zones or living in foreign countries. Here is what we found:
• The RCP team has players in 4 different time zones, with most team members living in the UTC+3 and +4 time zones. AnnenMay lives abroad in Germany (UTC+2), but lives closer to the rest of the team than Mikhail-rus who lives in the same country, but in time zone UTC+8.
• The USA team is spread pretty evenly across Eastern, Central, and Pacific time zones (UTC-4, -5, and -7, respectively) so most team members have never met in person. Surprisingly, Mingo (in Vermont) lives closer to Mexico’s ComplixVandh (in Boston) and Ukraine’s bazilyuk (in Montreal) than to any other members of the USA team!
• Even though Mexico’s ComplixVandh and danielayala both live in the USA (UTC-4 and -7, respectively), they both live closer to their other Mexican teammates (UTC+6)  than to each other.
• Several teams have a single player living abroad in a significantly different time zone: Hong Kong’s Sunny lives in London (UTC+1, with 7 hours difference), Malaysia’s ykit244 in Prague (UTC+2 with 6 hours difference), Peru’s -Nari- in Germany (UTC+2, with 7 hours difference), and Ukraine’s bazilyuk in Montreal (UTC-4, with 7 hours difference).
• Lastly, some players live abroad, but with relatively insignificant time differences compared to the rest of their teams: Latvia’s Alexey_LV (in Cambridge, UTC+1, with 2 hour difference), Lithuania’s Muzhachello (in Georgia, UTC+4, with 1 hour difference) and Romania’s IoanaFelicia (in Switzerland, UTC+2, with 1 hour difference).

Did you know…?

• Having been asked by several players that he unblock them on BGA, Viv- (Fra) decided to do some serious BGA account ‘house-cleaning’…but first he needed help to get a list of all the players he had blocked. Even viv- was surprised by the length of that list: 1235 blocked players!! 🤯. 
• After 40 minutes of waiting for a script to list the names and profile links of the blocked players, and another 2 hours of clicking links and removing red-thumbs on BGA, viv- successfully finished unblocked all of the existing BGA accounts on the list (he couldn’t unblock the 88 accounts that no longer exist).

Bikini points of the week: 🙂

• For those of you who weren’t watching Nallerheim’s live stream of the Taiwan-Latvia match this week, Elias / ComplixVandh (Mex) accidentally created the instant “bikini points” meme in the chat!

• The Curiosities team would also like to award bikini points to kaika87 (Malaysia) for pointing it out to us that there is an evil hamster riding the Dodo that killed Complix.