Sebastian Rittau

Author: srittau

  • Team PTQ Charleston in Berlin

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    Yesterday we had a team PTQ for Pro Tour Charleston in Berlin. The turnout was pretty with 23 teams for a total of 69 players, although we had a few players from Hamburg and eventual winners, Team Hans (Hans-Joachim Höh, Pro Tour Honolulu quarterfinalist Maximilian Bracht, and Stefan Urban), came from further away even. At first I was a bit worried,…

  • Deck Viewer for Pro Tour coverage

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    The Pro Tour video coverage is nice, although there is one thing that has been nagging at me for a while: The cards are hard to recognize. While this was ok, when I still recognized the cards by image, it was rather difficult with the Pro Tour Prague coverage, since I didn’t know most Dissension cards…

  • Python Bindings for librsvg

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    Background: I started to re-write the old GNOME Chess application in Python. GNOME Chess is still a Gtk+ 1.2 application and as its Debian maintainer I want a modern version in Debian. Of course the chess board should be drawn with Cairo and the chess pieces were supposed to be SVG graphics. After a little research I…

  • Player Prototypes

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    Mark Rosewater wrote an article in which he revisits his Timmy, Johnny and Spike prototypes of Magic players. He makes a good point saying that these prototypes, or psychographic profiles, are just isolations of personality traits of a certain groups of players. But I think it is an error to describe these prototypes too detailed, and even to sub-divide them…

  • Elevators

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    The elevators at mathematical department of the Berlin University of Technology where I work are known to be broken pieces of utter crap. Sometimes they stop at but don’t open the doors. The trick is to push the “Open Doors” button at just the right moment in these cases. But this is especially annoying in the evening when waiting…

  • Grand Prix Dortmund

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    It was not clear whether I would be invited to Grand Prix Dortmund. I had heard through the grapevine that I was on the list of replacements should any other judge cancel his invitation. But in the end I was invited. At that point I didn’t know that GP Dortmund was going to be the most…

  • Grand Prix Hasselt – The Tournament

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    Before writing about GP Dortmund, I have to wrap up my report from GP Hasselt. So here it is briefly: The event too place in the Ethias Arena in Hasselt. This was a large stadium, the is probably usually used for sports events. The chairs were folded back, so we had a lot of space. Day 1…

  • Grand Prix Hasselt – Getting There

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    Last weekend I was at Grand Prix Hasselt. I had to get up early on Friday morning to catch my train. Unfortunately I was about half an hour too early. This gave me ample time to watch the InterCity train on the neighbouring track failing to move on; since Zoo station has only a total of…

  • Looking Forward to Grand Prix Hasselt

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    Grand Prix Hasselt is coming. I know because I have to catch a train tomorrow at 7 in the morning. I am really looking forward to the 8 hour train drive, which includes changing trains twice. (As a tribute to a fellow judge and blogger I give you anecdote #1: The second train changing will take place in…

  • Guildpact Prerelease

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    For a summary see the last paragraph of this post. Yesterday was the big prerelease for Guildpact. As always I judged it at the FUNtainment Game Center here in Berlin. It was a fairly successful event. With 97 players we had one the largest prereleases (the largest even?) in Germany. And that is considering that there were about five other…