Charity Challenge 2021 - Week 1 Night 5

We’ve reached the end of the first week of the Charity challenge in support of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. We’ve already raised $70 of our $600 goal – thank you to my parents for being the most recent donation.

If you’d like to donate, you can do so here.

We appreciate you donating, cheering us on and following along with this process every year. Thank you all so much.

The Choice

Week 1 is already wrapped up after my win in Night 4, so today is a dead rubber match where the outcome is more for pride than overall impact of the competition.

Rachel has the pick and has decided to be strategic with her choice for tonight, she’s decided to take one of my guaranteed win games off the table for future weeks where I would actually need the win. So tonight Rachel has selected Crokinole.

The Game

Crokinole is a dexterity game that plays out the dynamics of something like curling on a game board.  Crokinole is a cottage country classic, played widely and often taught by the elders and passed down to generations of grand children.  If you’ve never seen it played before you really should check out the championship games that are on YouTube (yes I watch them).  In the game you are flicking discs and if your opponent has no pieces on the board you are just trying to sink the disc in the hole in the middle of the board.  If your opponent has a piece on the board you need to hit their piece or your shot doesn’t count.

At our (relatively low) level of skill, the game is about controlling the board, making sure you keep your pieces protected and your opponents pieces off of the board.

If you’d like to see some great Crokinole played here is one of those championship videos I mentioned.  Please note – we are not this good.

The Result

Guys – I think I made Rachel mad. At the very least, I made her extremely competitive. Rachel hasn’t won a full 300 point match of Crokinole against me in almost 4 years. And last night she beat me hard! The final score was 385 to 120.

I started off the game running away with it, and then Rachel decided enough of that and I just never had a scoring round again. In the last round she scored over 100 points.

I suspect this sets us up for the rest of the competition – Rachel might have lost week 1, but she is not down and out by a long shot.