New Year's Honours List

Happy New Year ABSP members! The start of a new year means it's time for Wayne Kelly to reveal the updated titles and awards after 2023.

Firstly, many thanks to the Stewart Houten and Rachel Bingham for their parts in the maintenance of the database over the last year. Contained in this post will be Titles information, Highest Rated Player, Most Improved Player and a few other stats!

Titles

I think it may be the worst-kept secret in the ABSP community but this year, after a long wait, we finally have a new title holder. Natalie Zolty scored 5 170s in a row and had to wait until the final event of the year to get her average for the year back to 170 to attain the rank of Expert. Many congratulations to Natalie for holding her nerve and getting her just reward.

Potential Experts:

• 3 years
  • Colin Northmore (3 170+ ratings)
  • Wolfram Poh (3 170+ ratings)
• 2 years
  • Chris Cummins (2 170+ ratings)
  • Jack Moran (2 170+ ratings)
  • Brian Po (2 170+ ratings)
  • Wale Ilori (1 180+ and 1 170+ rating)
  • Chris Lipe (1 180+ rating from last year)
• 1 year
  • John Ashmore
  • Sunny Bhatia (first 170+ rating)
  • Joanne Craig
  • David Delicata
  • Nick Deller
  • Stewart Houten
  • Mohamed Alieu Kamara
  • Toby Abs (first 170+ rating)
  • Chris Vicary
  • Ryan Wee (first 170+ rating)

Potential GMs:

• 1 year
  • Kong Chock Heng (1st 180+ rating)
  • Rik Kennedy

There are some with potential to get back on the ladder but with a rating higher than their previous best so they have been excluded. Let me know if you think there is anything amiss.

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Highest Rated Player

The Highest Rated Player Award is given to the highest rated ABSP Member on January 1st of each year, provided that they have played at least 30 games in the previous year. The winner is Harshan Lamabadusuriya (194) Harshan has certainly made his mark on not just the ABSP scene this year but with second place in the WESPAC event also, he went global! (Brett Smitheram had not played 30 games this year).

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Most Improved Player

The Most Improved Player award is given to the ABSP member (as at 31st Dec) who has a full rating at the start of the calendar year, plays at least 30 games throughout that year and improves their rating the most. The player's rating at the end of the year must be higher than any previous end-of-year full rating. The winner for 2023 with an improvement of 34 from 106 to 140 is Barry French. Barry played 254 games over the year.

Four other players met the criteria and improved by at least 10:

• +18 69 Lisa Atkins
• +17 105 Kevin Rayment
• +11 139 Rebecca Wilkinson
• +11 164 Joel Davey

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Some other stats:

• Most games played and most prolific Expert – Craig Solomons (395)
• Most prolific GM – Phil Robertshaw (153)

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Unweighted ratings for those with a rating over 150 plus details of highest games scores for 2023 can be found on the ABSP database. Well done to all winners - and those that missed out - keep trying!

Wayne Kelly