2-5 September 2010 • Three World Championships + NATwA Pairs
Vienna, Virginia USA
Eight of the UK’s top tiddlywinks players, sporting their custom-made squidgers, will soon arrive in the US hoping to beat the US’s top winkers in a series of serious winking championships. The competition will be fierce, combining strategies of squopping (landing on and controlling enemy winks) and potting (sending friendly winks into the cup) supplemented by gromps, denurdling, boondocks, and bristols. Note: all of these winks terms, and more, are defined at www.tiddlywinks.org/lexicon.
More winking titles are on the line in September 2010 than at any other time in the 55 years since the first winks club was formed in 1955 at Cambridge University in England. Here’s what’s in the mix for winks competitions during the first winkend of September:
- World Singles #64 on 2 September: America’s Larry Kahn challenges the current World Singles champ, Matt Fayers of England
- World Teams #4 on 3 September, with the best squoppers and squidgers of the UK vs. the US’s top winkers
- NATwA Pairs #39 from 4-5 September
- World Pairs # 37 starting the evening of 4 September, with Severin Drix and Ferd Wulkan of the US challenging current Pairs champions Larry Kahn (US) and Matt Fayers (UK)
In the World Teams Championship, the USA will be represented by:
- Severin Drix of Valois NY
- Bob Henninge of Millfield OH
- Larry Kahn of Vienna VA
- Dave Lockwood of Silver Spring MD
- Jon Lockwood of Silver Spring MD
- Mac McAvoy of Millfield OH
- Rick Tucker of Alexandria VA
- Ferd Wulkan of Montague MA
The UK will be represented by:
- Alan Dean of Sandy
- Matt Fayers of London
- Andrew Garrard
- Alan Harper
- Charles Relle of Maidstone, Kent
- Matthew Rose
- Stew Sage of Cambridge
- Geoff Thorpe
The World Teams event has its roots in Oxford University’s tour of the US in the Fall of 1962, sponsored by Guinness Ale, when Oxford beat all challengers, including a team from the New York Giants. A decade later, in 1972, the MIT Tiddlywinks Association toured the UK and astounded complacent Brits by beating nearly every UK team.
Formal matches involving the best winkers in the UK competing against the best in the US, like golf’s Ryder Cup, officially began in 1978. The UK won that match. The next match in 1985 was won by the US. The 2005 World Teams match, won by the UK, took place during the celebrations surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Club, the first tiddlywinks club, formed in 1955.
The World Pairs and World Singles championships have their own histories dating back to 1971.