Toby Harris mode... engaged. (If this is as good as one of his con reports then I'll be laughing!)
        For me, at least, the First Mind Sports Olympiad lasted two days on Monday 18th and Tuesday 19th August. It
was held at the Royal Festival Hall in London. I was staying with a friend in Norbiton because I had an interview
with a vamp, er, puzzle magazine firm on the Monday, and it seemed like a good excuse to check out the action.
        My overall impressions are mixed but optimistic. The organisation was not up to scratch this year, but the
people involved are the right ones and the intentions are good. I was almost certainly expecting too much for them
to have sorted out all the problems on the first couple of days of a brand new event; that said, if the problems,
which I'll discuss later, don't get sorted out before long, then the convention could be in trouble.
        You might remember that I plugged the MSO in GIT 7 and advertised a colour supplement to The (super soaraway
sensational funtastic 10p) Times which you could get if and only if OMR was printed on the Saturday, posted early on
the Sunday, collected at once and delivered the next day. Things went pear-shaped at the printers, so you may have
missed out - a shame, as the supplement was quite interesting, even if it did contain the D'OH!-making statement that
Diplomacy was best played with six players. To summarise: big event with œ100,000 of wedge to be played for featuring
tournaments in 40+ different games ranging from Chess, Scrabble and Bridge to Abalone, Entropy and Twixt via Shogi,
Xiagnqi and Owari. Plenty of the familiar, plenty of the obscure, plenty of games foreign to me  and a load of skill
(memory, IQ, creative thinking et al) tests as well. Organised by the top folks in the field, plans to make this
globally important, the first Next Big Thing of the 21st century.
        The events had different formats; each of the seven playing days had a morning 10-2 session and an afternoon
4-8 session, some events lasted one session, others two, four or five, some stripped through the week (chess every
morning!), some taking up both sessions on one or two days. The longer events carried bigger purses (the chess events
œ10k between them; Chinese and Japanese chess œ4,000 plus each; the Stratego œ2,500 counting all the smaller prizes;
lots of the other, smaller tournaments also ran); a prestige event was Pentamind - enter five or more different
tournaments which don't clash, get a score for each one based purely on position within that tournament, add the best
five together and the top overall score wins a return trip to NY on Concorde. Pentamind also let you enter as many
tournaments as you liked for œ50; definitely the way to do it when the alternative was fees of œ12.50 for one-session
competitions, œ17.50 for two-session events and œ25 for the biggest tournaments.
        I hadn't pre-registered for any of the events; my best hopes were Stratego on the wrong weekend and Hare
And Tortoise (scheduled for Tuesday morning and, alas, Wednesday morning also; alas for I needed to be back at home
in Middlesbrough by 2pm Wednesday, meaning Tuesday evening was as late as I could stay), but were I to go for the
Pentamind, Beginners' Backgammon, a Games Workshop (ahem!) medley and, ooh, probably Creative Thinking, would round my
choice off. As I write, it's late on Tuesday night, I'm back at home in Middlesbrough, ready to sign on tomorrow, and
I don't really have another excuse to go back to London for more which doesn't involve me spending LOTS of wonga.
        Anyroad, the first event I could get to the Olympiad for was the Monday afternoon session. This happened to
host Beginners' Backgammon, which sounded intriguing; I had played one game of backgammon before ever so felt I was a
good candidate for a beginners' session. The directions to the Royal Festival Hall were disappointingly incomplete and
I'm sure I found the way in through a side door (no wonder the map in The Times didn't work!); rather a disorientating
start. Having climbed a flight of stairs I was right in the middle of 30 games of chess, not a game I love. The first
thing that I saw at all familiar to me was a sign inviting me to win a copy of Save The President. Not a great start.
        I wandered to a stall selling programmes, and duly wasted three coins on a flashy, but flimsy, one, and went
to the nearby sales stalls still after the sight of something comforting. That thing was to be the SFC Press stand and
Paul Evans, who I had not long before been e-mailing, and he was kind enough to be the person I used to help me find
my bearings. The next stand along was a very big Save The President one with J*ck J*ffe in person. It took a deliberate
effort to keep well away for fear of the A or S words slipping out. (Didn't see any copies of it being bought, though.)
        After that, I had rather more of a clue as to what was where and so I stuck my name down for the backgammon.
One application form and œ12.50 later I was handed a badge and became an official Mind Sportsperson. A couple of
wanders about the building later (very Goosey Goosey Gander - having ploughed past a security guard who didn't stop
people still in interview dress, I went up and down the floors, out of ANOTHER exit and back round again for another
try) I had got my bearings, found the way to the backgammon area on the fifth floor and reported to the backgammon
tournament's director. Quickly he struck me as being a less-than-organised old buffer; it's probably unreasonable to
blame him for the delays in getting the final list of who was playing and who wasn't, but it shouldn't have taken him
half an hour to make the draw for the first round between the three dozen-ish contestants. It was a nervy half hour for
me as it looked like there was just going to be a tournament, and not instruction as the "beginners" tag had suggested.
I watched a couple of games in the background and tried to pick up technique. I knew the rules, of course, and had read
some articles about Backgammon, but this was playing for real...
        My first match was against a friendly moustached guy called James Stevens who claimed not to have played the
game for three years (using it to fill in a slot in his Pentamind selection of five). I won my first game against him,
confusingly and gratifyingly, mostly because he explained to me how the bearing-off/winning-the-game rules worked.
Normal service was soon resumed and he won the match 5-2. He didn't win again that day, so was probably lucky to hit
inexperienced me as his first match. Second up was a Scandi woman called Figen Phelps, who was unlucky to lose her
first match against a top player; she smoked, so we played outside on the balcony. It was a warm evening and the view
was magnificent for a fan of urban scenery like me; we played next to a match on a huge set sold for œ395 which
had pieces each as big as two digestives - MacVities ones, too, not cheap own brand. Needless to say, she dispatched me
with consumate ease, winning 5-1, yet her husband was still scathing of her play. Glad he didn't comment on mine.
        Third was Miki Naito, a short Japanese lady whose vocabulary was limited to "My name is Miki Naito, I come from
Japan", "Sorry", "Thank you" and, interestingly, "Cocked dice". I won the first two games, lost the next five, but was
feeling closer to being at my level; having lost my first three games, my next match would be against someone else
similarly unfortunate. A pause of about an hour followed because the TD was simply not competent at organising a Swiss
format tournament; I had to specifically point the wait out to him to get another match (reluctantly, as I like to be
nice to TDs). That led to a match against Michael Curran in an air-conditioned room, as the balcony had been reserved
for a champagne reception for sponsors and Olympiad staff, which performed far-from-ideal noisy background for serious
mental sports. I won the first game, lost the second, was winning the third, offered my first double ever, had it
accepted, went on to win anyway (3-1!), had a few jammy rolls in the fourth, offered another double which was again
accepted, had some more jammy rolls and had the game conceded to me. 5-1 win! This made the tournament an outstanding
success for me as far as I was concerned. Mike was a nice chap and lost in very good grace. Lastly I faced Ken Wilshire,
a canny man with a 2-2 record and in a desperate rush to catch a train (for by now it was not far off 10pm - two hours
after the scheduled end!) who rushed the director into declaring me a suitable opponent for him. Ken was another
Pentamind-er, the other four in his selection being Mastermind, IQ, Creative Thinking and Memory Skills. I later found
out he won the bronze medal in the World Memory Championships, which scared me, but he could also have won a medal in
the World Personable Opponent Championships as well. Maybe it's just me starting to enjoy the company of management
consultants and bankers. Won, lost a backgammon, lost, lost by a whisker - a 5-1 win for him in quick time.
        My overall 1-4 record was as good as I could have hoped for and quite pleasing; two people managed not to win
at all, nine others tied with me on only one win (though I probably would have been last of them on points scored and
conceded) and 24 won two or more. The winner was Richard Biddle, a name which rang bells, but an American Richard
Biddle - the only person on 5/5. Overall, I was unimpressed with the way the tournament was organised and with the fact
it took six hours rather than the advertised four, meaning I caught a very late train back; I was also less than
impressed that at least ten of the participants in the beginners' tournament also played in the top-class big-money
Backgammon event over the next four days as well, making the "beginner" tag of the event a little misleading. As it was
the first day of the first Olympiad I was prepared to give them some of the benefit of the doubt, though.
        Yet even so it was a tricky decision as to whether to make the effort to get up early again and go to the Hare
and Tortoise event the next day. The standard in the backgammon was rather high, and I feared that my three-game
career history would be similarly exposed in matches against professors, boffin, twenty-year veterans of the game and
the like; still, based on the fact that it was a game that I enjoyed playing and losing, and that the concept of a Mind
Sports Olympiad was an inherently Good Thing, but bearing in mind the œ17.50 cost of the option, I decided to turn up
and pay two-sessions' worth of money only to participate in just one morning's action. Hence I was more than a bit
hesitant in turning up. At least this time I knew what the form was, where to go to register, which lifts to take to 
find my way around the building and so forth, and was sufficiently tempted to throw good money after bad.
        So I filled out a second registration form and made my way up to the sixth floor. Four different events were
taking place in the same area; Lines of Action, Abalone, Twixt and Hare and Tortoise. There should have been a contest
in Fanorona as well, but nobody entered it. This didn't come as a big surprise to me. My hopes for taking part in the 
Hare and Tortoise were that the overall Olympiad would have disastrously small attendance and so the competitions would
only have a very few entrants, maximising my small chance of winning a prize. Indeed, the Magic: the Gathering and 8x8
Draughts tournaments, both scheduled for five mornings, attracted so few competitors (eight and seven respectively!)
that they decided to cut them down all the way to a couple of mornings' competition... but kept the large prizes that
had already been designated for them. The overall policy was not to insist on a minimum number of participants greater
than the number of contestants required for one game of a particular mind sport, for that game's tournament to still
go ahead. Next year I think they'll be rather cannier in knowing what events will and what events won't draw in the 
public, have more entrants to the event anyway, so not have as many problems on this front.
        Hare amd Tortoise is a race game in which the players decide how far to move each turn instead of rolling a
dice to decide; players have limited numbers (65 each) of carrots to begin with, moving one space in a turn costs 1
carrot, a two space move costs 3, a three space move 6 and so on triangularly up to horrendous amounts. You could move
the entire length of the board in one turn if you had more carrots than the EEC carrot mountain. Carrots are earned by
being on certain squares at certain times, and some pay out only if certain numbers of opponents are ahead of or behind
you (and they get a chance to move and disrupt your preparations before you collect the carrots). The only, small,
element of luck is in "jugging the hare"; landing on certain spaces makes you roll dice and consult a chart as to what
the effect is. Also, during the race, you have to land on certain other spaces which permit you to chew one of your
initial allocation of three lettuces; having any lettuces left means that you can't win the game.
        There were two entrants in the Hare and Tortoise event waiting for me when I arrived. The tournament director
here was overjoyed to see me turn up and increase the number by 50%. My confidence got an immediate boost as I felt
that I had a real chance of winning a medal. The three of us were the only participants in the so-called World
Championship. We got to know each other fairly well quite quickly; I was up against Stephen Taverner (who Games Games
Games readers may recognise as a contributor) and Ben Croucher, another Pentamind player who had only decided to play 
this game after finding it was the only one with an Olympiad tournament that he could buy from Just Games (he bought a
set solely for the purpose of having a fifth event to play in the Pentamind - a committed attitude). The tournament
director was Dan Glimne, who said before too long that he was the inventor of Games Workshop's DungeonQuest. I only 
narrowly avoided pulling the "We're not worthy!" routine from Wayne's World. He was an effective, cool TD as well.
        The plan was for us to play three games on the Tuesday morning, on the basis that a family game of Hare and
Tortoise takes about an hour, and three more games on Wednesday morning. The scoring system awarded five points to
the winner of each game, three points to the runner-up, two points to third place and (had it been needed!) one point
to the fourth placed player, with one of any points earned being deducted from a player who had still a lettuce to
chew when the leader won the race. We played with the Ravensburg edition of the board which I hadn't seen before (as
I had only ever played the Intellect edition of the game), no restriction on having to have fewer than twenty carrots
left to finish, and a jugging-the-hare scheme resolved by rolling 2d6 and consulting a chart which awarded effects
based solely on roll, completely independent of position. This was not like any game of Hare and Tortoise I had ever
played before, so my medal ambitions quickly turned back to bronze.
        The first game quickly set the form for the event; a standard opening of moving seven to the first lettuce
square was quickly established as being vastly superior to all others; we were all somewhat scornful of the risks
posed by an arbitrary hare-jug. Two main strategies exist in the game, the hare strategy and the tortoise strategy:
the first consists of racing ahead with consistent middle-sized jumps, chewing lettuces as and when, coping with a
small number of carrots and just crawling over the finish line with a couple of carrots to spare; the tortoise
strategy involves hanging around as a back-marker, chewing lettuces early and building up a truly gross number of
carrots to be used at the end in a couple of mammoth leaps. The lack of upper limit on carrot holdings required to win
the game meant that the tortoise strategy was much more powerful than the hare, as you didn't have to ensure that
you didn't overshoot the finish line by 21 carrots or more. Ben won the first game and I won the second with a handful
of carrots left over. Stephen, who seemed to know most about how to play the game, was dead last each time.
        The third game wasn't a bad one for me. I can't remember many of the details, but I won, Ben took second place
but hadn't disposed of his last lettuce by the time I finished, so earned only two points rather than three, and once
more Stephen brought up the rear. Hence I picked up 5 points and the other two only scored 2 each, making the running
total 13-10-6 in my favour. We had run through all three games by about half past eleven, though - and that came after
a start delayed by fifteen minutes to see if anyone else wanted to take their chances - and had encountered the exact
opposite problem to yesterday's backgammon running overtime. I mentioned that I wasn't able to make it to day two of
the event, so, rather than having paid œ17.50 to play for about an hour, the director and my two competitors kindly
agreed to play the other three games of the tournament on the same day to complete the event in just one morning. As
they were both in the Pentamind, it meant that they could try something different themselves on the Wednesday morning
and so play in six events instead of five (you only count your five best disciplines for your overall score). Had I
been in their situation I'm not sure I would have agreed so readily, to be honest, as my Wednesday absence would have
made the games even easier for the two remaining players to score very well at.
        We took a break before the fourth game to be filmed by WTN (freelance TV firm providing daily condensed films
of all the events for sale to anyone willing to pay their fee) and to chat to a journalist from The Times (and there
was a full column-inch or two dedicated to that particular game within the general coverage of the Olympiad, though
without the results, on the Wednesday) before starting again for the second three games. With my large lead I decided
to try and see if I could make a hare strategy work when I started the fourth game; it was a waste of time and points
and I came a miserable last, denying the usual hare, Stephen, that position. Ben won easily to tie the competition at
15-15-9. Hare and Tortoise inventor David Parlett took a break from running the Skat (German three-player card game)
tournament to come and watch us incompetents playing his game, completely contrary to how he had intended it to be
played; I didn't recognise him, but Stephen did. David Pritchard - author of "The Family Book of Games", an incredibly
comprehensive almanac in its field, and hence authorised to recommend to the Olympiad board which games should and
shouldn't be in - was running another tournament in our room and he stopped to take an interest in what was going on.
        Game five was a disaster for me. After my failure as a hare, I decided to play an extremely strong tortoise
and spent a controversially large number of early turns on trying to earn carrots (when this can be done rather more
effectively in the second half of the game where there exist some fairly spectacularly quick carrot-earning methods).
Stephen, his chances of gold being more remote than the Sahara desert, turned to a policy of jugging the hare at
every opportunity. He rolled ten twice, a particularly auspicious roll, as it let you chew a lettuce on the spot, a
process normally requiring two missed turns and careful manouvering onto one of a rather limited number of spaces.
With two lettuces chewed very quickly he reverted to haring off to the finish line and won a very short game. I was
stuck in last place, albeit with almost 300 carrots left, but one lettuce remained undigested. I only scored one point
this time, Stephen won his first game and Ben scored three points; he had the overall lead for the first time since
after the first game with 18 points to my 16 and Stephen's 14. I assumed that that would be enough.
        The final game saw me start with a lucky jug, rolling an extremely helpful 10, and Ben was stuck with a "miss a
turn" 11 when he tried his luck. After that I applied the same tortoise tactics that had served me so well throughout
the day, consumed my lettuces with celerity, and maintained a steady but quick pace all the way home. I won my third
game of the day, Stephen came second, Ben came last for the first time and, oh, look, I've won the World Championship!
        Ben was really fairly unlucky with the dice rolls in the last game which had made the overall scores 21-20-17),
but I had won more games than him overall, and, as David Parlett pointed out, if he had wanted to, he could have chosen
to completely avoid all the hare squares and made it a game of pure skill on his part (though he wouldn't have been able
to do anything about my lucky roll when I tried). It's a bit of a worthless World Championship when there are only three
entrants out of the six billion in the world (or, more realistically, the three million plus who had bought the game,
though the vast majority of them were in Germany) and it was played using rules and a board designed to take a fair
bit of the skill out of the game, but it's a World Championship none the less. Furthermore, I suspect it will be the
last World Championship ever as they're not likely to run an event that attracted only three players again next year.
        Stephen and Ben were great company and fun opponents. We hung around together for the rest of the day. Stephen
was playing in the Entropy tournament in the afternoon, a game with which Ben and I were unfamiliar, so he kindly
agreed to teach us how to play it, and David Pritchard lent us his personal set when we couldn't find one elsewhere.
It's a neat little game. You need a 7x7 board and 7 beads in each of 7 colours, all shaken up in a bag. A match needs
two players; first they play a game with one as Chaos and the other as Order, with Order scoring according to the
final board position, then they swap roles and play a second game, so the other player gets a chance to score as Order.
The game consists of 49 turns. Each turn consists of Chaos drawing a bead out of the bag and placing it on any vacant
square on the board, then Order optionally moving any one piece on the board a rook's move. After all 49 beads are
drawn, laid and possibly moved, Order looks for symmetric patterns within the rows and columns (but not diagonals) on
the board. For instance: two adjacent beads of the same colour would score two, two red beads with a blue bead between
would score three, three adjacent beads of the same colour would score three for the three-symmetric PLUS twice two
for the two-symmetric pairs within, totalling 7, and so on. Depending on the sequence the pieces were drawn in and where
they were placed, a good score for Order is 70 to 100. Games last 15-40 minutes, matches twice that. Higher score wins.
        We played that to fill in the time from after the Hare and Tortoise finished, not long after one. When the
other two were playing, I chatted with David Pritchard, who was also a lovely guy, and really knew what he was on
about. Topics included games that were and weren't selected and the future of the event. This is why I'm so optimistic
that the MSO has a future! Diplomacy next year is quite possible; games might run from 10-2, pause for two hours, then
continue to a close from 4-8. I don't know how many rounds they'd play, though, and if it would be at a weekend or
midweek. Settlers of Catan may also appear (especially if I can lobby for it and/or volunteer to help as a staunch
supporter of their cause and a crowned World Champion).  They also expected this to be a disaster in terms of number of
entrants and regard this as a practice year to get everything sorted out; they've booked the Royal Festival Hall for
'98, '99 and 2000 as well, but I guess the main stumbling block will be getting sponsorship again. After that it might
well move to another city, such as Essen. David commented that the first year of Essen was an even bigger disaster.
        The prizegiving (for the Hare and Tortoise and the Draughts) was scheduled to take place soon after 2, so the
Hare-and-Tortoise-medallists table repositioned itself and its Entropy board in front of the stage at that point. The
medal ceremony was delayed until just before 4, though; some of the other events were over-running and they thought it
better not to interrupt them, plus a medal ceremony would be a good preface to the afternoon session. We didn't mind
and played Entropy for a couple more hours. I also wandered around and had a good look at everything else. The chess
tournament was prestigious and had a good number of GMs and IMs in, including 13-year-old prodigy Luke McShane who I
had never seen in the flesh before. Having never been to a chess event previously, the rows upon rows of tables
dedicated to the same game were mesmerising and a tiny part of me was tempted to throw my heavy sports bag into the
middle of them all as a random act of chaos, to injure and to disrupt. I kept it well under control, though.
        4:00 rolled around and soon afterwards photographers, cameramen and journalists started to surround the stage
with MC and professional smug bloke Raymond Keene stood atop it. They played the Fanfare For The Common Man (the one
used at the Olympics) as their anthem - but all two minutes plus of it. Finally at 4:08 they called up the three Hare
and Tortoise medallists in reverse order; David Parlett presented us with fairly chunky medals in posh presentation
cases... and slips of paper too? Turned out that the œ100K kitty stretched to even Mickey Mouse three-competitor
events like that. Stephen picked up œ25, Ben œ50 and I won a completely unexpected œ100. That, in effect, paid for
travel down and back, Olympiad tournament entry fees and for me to take my Norbiton friend out for a curry to thank
him for letting me crash at his flat. Lots of film and photos were taken, some with me wearing my medal. Alas, there
was no podium, but everything else was very professional and pseudo-Olympian. For comparison, the round of applause I
got at Manorcon for winning the United tournament was better, but there was a lot more cheering from random people who
didn't know me here, which was nice. I also got to meet the other crowned gold medallist at that time, Ronald King of
Barbados. He's the world champion at draughts, though computers are better than humans at it now. And his world title
actually means something, unlike mine, which just goes to show that the Olympiad has attracted the celebrities, though.
        Stephen and Ben went up for the Entropy tournament straight away after the presentation. It was held in the
same place as the Hare and Tortoise - and it had more than three players! Stephen had played it a lot before, but Ben
was entering just for fun having learned the game that day (and because it cost no more, having paid for Pentamind).
They had nine players there, so I was the tenth solely to make it up to an even number for the first afternoon. Two
rounds were played that afternoon, and three on Wednesday afternoon (which I wasn't there for). My first game was
against John Bosley who had learned the game the day before. He served pieces to me first, being rather more keen to
place pieces in awkward-to-get-at locations than Stephen or Ben, but I still managed to score 79, which I was quite
pleased with, being better than my two or three previous scores. I returned the favour to him - and found the time
factor in the game to be quite limiting. We were playing using chess clocks, which I hadn't used before; Chaos was
allowed 15 minutes for the game and Order half an hour. The Order time limit was reasonable, the Chaos time limit
quite tight. I managed to get all my pieces out in time, but only had a minute left. John scored 84. Rats.
        Game two was against... Ben Croucher! I had played him once already and lost, but he had found his form and had
beaten veteran Stephen in a non-tournament game. He served pieces to me first, I was lucky with the order in which they
came out and scored a cracking 86. I returned serve to him and thought I was doing quite well until it came to the final
count-up, when he pointed out symmetries that I had not seen surrounding symmetries that I had. Entropy has a heart- 
breaking tendency to do that to you. He scored a mammoth 50-plus with his horizontal rows, and I thought he had done
enough, but his vertical columns were weaker and his final score was 81. Whoops! I had beaten Ben again. In the
background, Luke McShane, having no chess commitments in the afternoon, was being Order to David Pritchard's Chaos and
scored 90. Sigh... I had a word with Luke and he seemed a decent kid for 13 with the makings of a neat sense of humour,
though he looks like he's only about ten. Nice lad, and another gaming celebrity crossed off the list.
        I had a last look around the place and came home. Though the organisation was lacking in some places and the
tendency to over- and under- estimate game and tournament lengths was fairly disastrous, towards the end the event was
starting to give off positive vibes to me, mainly because of the strength of gaming spirit of the people involved. To
an extent it smacks of being a money-making exercise for the MSO Directors; the entry fees aren't cheap, the spin-off
books and clothes are costly and there's a ludicrous scheme to give participants ratings and rankings much like the
FIDE chess ones with official certification for œ25 a pop. (I think I may have done enough to be officially designated
a Grandmaster at Hare and Tortoise already, though.)
        Yet it takes revolutionaries and pioneers to bring about massive changes, often for the better, and I couldn't
help feeling that maybe, just maybe, they might be On To Something Big. I'd regard it as a shame if it were to be
unfairly panned and go under next year lacking sponsorship. What relevance does it have to you and me, though? 
It's nice to see that there is a games hobby outside the remit of the major conventions devoted to particular games
and this gave me a good chance to see, if not sample, a lot of things in a short space of time. The Pentamind system
and the Decamentathlon artificial mix both seem like steps on the way forward, and I hope to see them flourish. Lots
of things with regard to publicity, event choice and organisation need to be sorted out, but I think next year there's
no reason why they shouldn't be a lot closer to being on the right lines. Going there was taking a risk, but I'm very
glad I went. For I was there at the first one, and I won a Mind Sports Olympiad Gold Medal which might, one day, come
to be thought of as being worth something, by association with prestigious MSO tournaments in other disciplines.
        And you can't take that away from me.