I wonder who's more exhausted after this week:  The teams in Shanghai, who have had a pretty relaxing schedule (only 48 boards a day playing 6-handed is not exactly a meat grinder,) or well-wishers on this side of the Pacific who have had to endure bedtimes we haven't seen since college (3AM, 4AM, 5AM, 6:30AM this morning.)

As expected, Canada's Seniors won the round robin phase in the Seniors Bowl.  But 3 losses in a row isn't the ideal way to enter the quarterfinals.  It's hard not to relax when you've got a commanding lead, though.

Yesterday the ladies played just well enough to NOT make it interesting, losing a close match to the Netherlands on Vugraph, winning 19-11 VPs against Germany (another clutch performance by Francine/Julie to cover Izzy/Sylvia's lose-a-dozenish card pretty much clinched a playoff berth) and then closing with another reasonably close loss against Argentina.  The good news is that they qualified comfortably for the quarterfinals, 9 VPs ahead of 9th place Netherlands.  The bad news is that they failed to make the top 4 teams and will consequently likely face USA 1 in the quarterfinal.  Oh well, always better to get the Final out of the way early.   In fact, this might be a blessing in disguise since stamina seems to be more of a factor for Canada than for the grizzled veterans of USA 1 and we would likely have to face them eventually anyway.

I should have checked Dan and Susie's blog before I speculated on likely quarterfinal matchups.  Canada plays Germany in the quarterfinals and won't have to face USA 1 until the final.

Linda and Pamela have really played well of late and almost managed to join Julie and Francine in the top 10 Butler rankings  While Izzy and Sylvia have continued to underperform, to put things in perspective their average Butler score of -0.42 is still better than Wally and Piotr's -0.47 and Nic and Kamel's -0.59.

Nickell's powerful USA 2 squad is out.  They never recovered from Soloway's absence due to emergency surgery.  Meckwell finished 3rd in the Butler and Nickell/Freeman went plus in the Butler but the Hamman-Lall partnership never really seemed to click.   A 25-5 win in their last match vs Norway would have been just enough, and the Norwegians made plenty of mistakes, but perfection eluded USA 2 and a 19-11 VPs win left them 5.5 VPs short of 8th place South Africa.

Today's the Texas-OU game.  UT has completely unravelled this year and are 12-point underdogs, but if Canada can beat Italy, surely the Horns can find a way to beat OU.

Hook 'em!

Some good videos that give the feel of Shanghai and the playing site can be found here.