World Backgammon Association – 2007 Winners

2007 was another great year. The World Backgammon Association continued to ensure a lot of efforts went into promoting the game and into expanding its activities to new countries and regions. New partners and alliances in emerging countries were added to the list and we welcomed representatives from Turkey, Greece, Romania, South Africa, Georgia and Russia.

WBA also helped to produce one of the best backgammon television productions - the "Crowns Cup". It featured a 16 player, high-rollers challenge in Berlin (Germany), with a massive 250,000 USD prize pool. A total of 16 episodes were produced and successfully broadcoasted.

But more importantly, the WBA started a new era with the first season of the prestigious European Backgammon Tour (EBGT).

This Tour which truly is on a pan-European level, gathered 4 classics of the circuit under one umbrella with a unified ranking and a joint cooperation between the different organizers, directors and federations.

All tournaments of the EBGT had substantial added money, out of which 10% was taken out for the overall leading 3 players, according to the Masterpoint system (addition of all matches won in main, consolation and last chance rounds in the Masters divisions, according to the match lengths). €10,000 was collected to crown the leading 3 players of the EBGT during the upcoming Portuguese Open (April 29th - May 4th) in Europe's biggest casino in Estoril.

The 4 stops of the EBGT paid out a total of over 600,000 USD in prize money to the winners, making it the richest Tour so far. Nearly 200 unique players from 28 nations participated, among them some of the finest players in the world including Sander Lylloff (Denmark), Francois Tardieu (France), Matvey "Falafel" Natanzon (Israel), Masayuki "Mochi" Mochizuki (Japan), Peter Heitmüller (Germany) and Bob Wachtel (USA), just to name a few.

The race was close between Danish Thomas Jespersen and German Norbert Wiebusch for the pole position of the list and it went all the way until the last tournament in Venice to fix the overall victory for Thomas. But he was also a shooting star among the players when he made it to the top 3 with a tremendous streak of victories at the end of the season. Georgian Badri Tsertsevadze could score big by winning the French Open and the consolation of the City of Venice.

European Backgammon Tour 2007



But there is more to report.

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