German Nationals 2008

[AvGalen]

Whhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaattttttttttt a mission. oh my god.

ok finally home!
...
also, if there is an aachen open i will definitely come, as long as it is not the same weekend as the swiss open. i might also need to stay at arnaud's for a month beforehand so that i can sub 2 on 5x5

You forgot to add that 90384km queue to the loo in the picture. If anyone could tell me how you create those pictures I will add some old and new ones (Polish Open 2007, Euro 2008 and Eriks Danish Open 2008 are the first that come to mind)

It seems that my 2009 will be extremely full. Maybe I should take 1 huge sabbatical:
* Aachen Open: Have Charlie over for a month
* Australia: Going there just for the cube and tennis tournaments seems like a waste of time/money. Might as well travel
* US Open: A couple of weeks travelling with Charlie (and maybe others) is definately on the schedule
* Worlds: Plans are a little vague and undefined, but doing a Peking Express style travelling (by car for now, but maybe by train) is currently in my agenda

I am willing to accept sponsors for all of this. Actions you want in return for this can be discussed (PM please)

 

[highKO]

Thanks!

Wow, this competition was hectic:
= A lot of people in a very small room
...
we had good help from our friends, especially Rama, Arnaud, Maria, Charlie and Sébastien, but also the others not mentioned.

I hope you had a great time.
Ron

Hi,

At first a great and special thank to Ron and Ton and all the helping hands to organize and proceed this event! This was my very first time at a cube competition and I got a lot of impressions, inspirations and a lot of fun as well. From my point of view the main experience was to practice cubing with very nervous fingers and stressed by misplaced edges from myself and so on ;-) I did not reach my goal to finish with a average sub 30, but I was satisfied to get my first WCA ranking *yippi* (about 2 years ago I restarted to solve the cube after 20 years paused ;-) with solving times about 4 Minutes *hehe*)

Now I'm a little bit more familiar with the processes (register/scrambling/judging) at a competition and I learned that the help from the competitors was very necessary as well to make the event successfully. So I guess I could provide a helping hand at the next german competition if accepted...

It was very nice to meet all this cubing enthusiasts and get in touch with some of them. I'm looking forward for one of the next event as this.

Ciao ..highKO..

 

[fw]

I was hoping a Germans cubers would volunteer

Hm. Nobody asked us. As far as I know. I am sure, almost everyone of the german cubers would have helped if he would have been asked. Well, anyway, thanks to you guys all for organizing this event!

 

[Ton]

I was hoping a Germans cubers would volunteer

Hm. Nobody asked us. As far as I know. I am sure, almost everyone of the german cubers would have helped if he would have been asked. Well, anyway, thanks to you guys all for organizing this event!

Hmm
if I shout I need judges and scrambles , at every start of an event ... ,this should give the cubers a hint that I need help....

 

[CharlieCooper]

I was hoping a Germans cubers would volunteer

Hm. Nobody asked us. As far as I know. I am sure, almost everyone of the german cubers would have helped if he would have been asked. Well, anyway, thanks to you guys all for organizing this event!

Hmm
if I shout I need judges and scrambles , at every start of an event ... ,this should give the cubers a hint that I need help....

yeah, and also ton did post before the event on here saying it would be nice if some people helped to judge and scramble? plus, it's nice to help at every competition you go to! it's no fun if ron and ton have to be on full speed all day, they want to have a nice time too :rolleyes:

 

[Rama]

Maybe we should appoint volunteers?

At every competition I am like ''I will do nada'', but eventually I end up judging, even better I help judging for events I don't even compete in...

Problem also is is that people in the first group suddenly run off when they have to judge in the second group.

And yes, I only went to the loo and the line going to the Jumbo stand back was like 50 miles away with a detour and 1 mile without a detour, but there were people sitting everywere on the ground there.

 

[Laetitia]

Finally back in Lyon.

Did you know that :
-I went to Essen during thursday to friday night by train without having an idea of where I would stay on friday night?
-Finally, I stayed at the hotel with the V-cubers, at Erik's and Sebastien's room.
-I took a lot of differents trains during this week-end (from Lyon to Paris, from Paris to Bruxelles, from Bruxelles to Dortmund, from Dortmund to Essen, from Rotterdam to Paris, from Paris to Lyon, and also trains from Essen to the hotel)

-I solved looooooooooots of 5x5x5, 6x6x6 and 7x7x7 during 3 days
-Sebastien, Erik, Michael, Dan, and I sat in the back of the V-cube van, on lots of V-cubes.
-Arnaud and Franck can do the right scramble on a 7x7x7 (but I can't^^)
-We exchanged 1 dollar bill for 1 euro coin with the cubers from the US
-Arnaud wore the 5 differents V-cubes T-shirts at the same time !

 

[Markus Pirzer]

I was hoping a Germans cubers would volunteer

While the first round I had almost no time to help with judging.

I arrived almost an hour later than planed, because:
- my train was a few minutes late
- there was a bulding site at the main railway station in Essen and the first 3 entrances to the metro which I found were closed
- i walked past the only open entrance, therfore I needed almost half an hour from the railway station to the metro
- the ticket machine at the metro didn't want to accept my money
- although I was on the right place on the right time, I took the wrong train (U17 instead of U11)
- when I was back, i didn't get the first train to the fair, because of masses of people which all had the same destination
- when I arrived, I had to wait about 10 minutes for buying a ticket (last year I ordered my ticket weeks before and next time I will do this again).

I competed in all events and the little time I had between I used for practising and talking with some other cubers.
2 times I had to repair my magic because of broken strings (one immediatly after beginning practising, another one after my first 2 solves).

After I completed all events, I left the Jumbo stand for lunch and looking around a little bit.

When I came back from lunch, Ron asked me for judging and I immediatly began and judged until the blindfolded event, where I competed myself.

I think the main problem was that there was not enough room for more timers. Even if there would have been more judges, I don't think we could have matched the time schedule. As far as I know, all timers were used almost all the time. Sometimes I even had to wait until there was a free timer.

Another problem were the masses of people which made the way to the timers difficult for the judges and competitors. When I judged Frank Morris the first time, some viewers even blocked one of the timer and I had to ask them going away.

 

[anders]

Maybe we should appoint volunteers?

It's there, it's only up to the guts of the organisers to impose the rule

1e2) All competitors must be available for judging, if needed by organisation team. Penalty: disqualification of the competitor for the competition.

 

[joey]

What I want to know is

Who won???

What did Joey do all week?

Did Joey break down and buy shampoo?

Where's that tennis racket video???

Erik and Kai won (international and national)

Monday: Spent the day with Joel, then picked up Rama and Arnaud for tea.
Tuesday: Went for a walkaround Cappelle.
Wednesday: Went to Gouda, had a bit of a look around, bought a dutch phrasebook.
Thursday: Went to Deflt, but got off at Deflt Zuid by accident, where there was nothing to see!
Friday:Had a bit of a cube/rest, since we were driving to Germany that night.

Nope, I didn't buy shampoo, I tried to spend as little money as possible!

I'm not sure if we took a video,I remember Arnaud asking not for it

 

[Erik]

Finally got back after more than a week being away and doing cube things.
I had a great time. Kudos for Ron and Ton for organising!!!!!!!
I got pretty good times at the Nationals I was relaxed. My one handed is improving a lot now!

So many things to tell, like sitting in the back of a van with 2 americans, a dutch guy, a german and a french girl. But I'll do that later.
Also I'll try to get the results of the V-cube competition up, I think they are on my USB stick but I'll check taht later, it's now bedtime!

 

[Raffael]

Did you know that..

..
I arrived almost an hour later than planed, because:
..
- the ticket machine at the metro didn't want to accept my money
..

- you don't have to buy a ticket for subway if you travelled there by train

- competing in bld next to Dennis is not a good idea because your concentration simply vanishes after 1:23.93 and you have to start your memo all over again
- I got a new 5x5 PB single time in a competition again
- Dan had the funniest +2 ever (bad pop during his solve, another bad pop on his very last turn, fixed it, finished his solve with a wrong turn)
- the catering at the V-Cube-stand was excellent
- someone forgot a really excellent cube at the Jumbo-stand on saturday and they gave it to me on sunday. whoever can convince me that it belongs to him/her can have it back of course. (PM me if you think it's yours, please be honest)
- i certainly don't like doing all my 3x3 solves in a row but i guess under those circumstances nothing else would have worked
- all german cubers need to e-mail/PM me their postal adresses so we can ship the national cubing shirts
- if you are called Lucas Garron, PM me in case you want a shirt aswell
- next year the cubing area should be clearly divided in practicing area, competitors area and competition area
- the organizing/scrambling/judging people did a great job. thank you.

 

[Stefan]

- you don't have to buy a ticket for subway if you travelled there by train

Of course you don't have to, but you might get fined if you don't.

 

[Raffael]

- you don't have to buy a ticket for subway if you travelled there by train

Of course you don't have to, but you might get fined if you don't.

i just checked, they seem to have changed the conditions a bit.
you now have to have a "Bahn Card" and you have to travel further than 100 km.
http://www.bahn.de/p/view/preise/bahncard/cityticket.shtml

well, either they have changed the conditions or i was very lucky in the past not to get caught

anyway, thanks to Stefan for putting things right, this might save me a lot of trouble and money in future.

 

[Stefan]

Cool, it worked (I had heard about it before but didn't know the details and was too lazy to search for it myself).

 

[CharlieCooper]

- someone forgot a really excellent cube at the Jumbo-stand on saturday and they gave it to me on sunday. whoever can convince me that it belongs to him/her can have it back of course. (PM me if you think it's yours, please be honest)
.

might be arnaud's.

 

[BinomDreher]

I have just made a video of the 3x3x3 finals containing the top3 international and top3 german competitors - but the video is longer than the "10-minutes-of-youtube" (its around 13 minutes...). Any ideas how/where I can upload this now for you all?

 

[Pedro]

cut the video in 2 parts?

 

[Cerberus]

=( you can see my bad solves then....
After all it was a really nice competition but my nerves were totally wrecked somehow.... I hope to be able to go full potential next time, in the first round I was really shaky, but got a much better average then in the finals, but the crowd was really pissing there, they wanted to be so close to me that the steped up the stage and pressed onto me so that the 40*40cm were perfectly with me + 3 spectators... guess how much space I got... -__-
The finals were more relaxing in that point, but still I somehow sucked more there...

After all it was a GREAT job by the organisation team and everybody else, it was very stressfull but they kept calm to everybody and got everything running perfectly. Thanks for that!

 

[Raffael]

- someone forgot a really excellent cube at the Jumbo-stand on saturday and they gave it to me on sunday. whoever can convince me that it belongs to him/her can have it back of course. (PM me if you think it's yours, please be honest)
.

might be arnaud's.

it is indeed.