Christine Merrington won the Summer AC Handicap Tournament held at Woking on 14/15 August

[<<] [>>] by Bernard Jones at Woking
23rd August 2021 (AC - Handicap)

This year's tournament was held in mostly dry, mild weather with just a brief period of drizzle on the morning of the second day. A full complement of eight players took part, unusually from eight different clubs although none from the host club.

Handicaps ranged from 2 to 22 and to offset the very high number of bisques that would have been allocated in some games, their lengths were shortened to 22 or 18 points using the Bray system. Time limits of 2¾ hours were set for the first day in order to accommodate three rounds and 3¼ hours on the second with only two rounds to play.

The format on the first day was two blocks of four, randomly allocated, all playing all. The top two players in each block went into what was essentially a semi-final block on day two whilst the bottom four players fought for the five-to-eight positions. The last round thus involved matches to decide positions 1 and 2, 3 and 4, etc.

The 'final' took place between Christine Merrington (Littlehampton) and Wendy Spencer-Smith (Watford) with Christine winning and reversing her loss to the same opponent on the first day. In third place was Stephen Wingrove (Purley Bury).