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Back to 2009 King's Cup Live Coverage

2009 King's Cup Commentary: Round 2

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Go to: Before the Tournament, Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5, Round 6, Round 7, Round 8, Round 9, Round 10, Round 11, Round 12, Round 13, Round 14, Round 15, Round 17, Round 18, Round 19, Round 20, Round 21, Round 22, Round 23, Round 24, Round 25, Round 26, Round 27, Final Round 1, Final Round 2, Final Round 3, After the Tournament.

Ravee Joradol, who is the tournament director and doing an excellent job of keeping an eye on all of the players and staff, decides that he has too much time on his hands, and decides that annotation will go more smoothly if he has two junior staff do paper annotation while he enters the results into the laptops. He's a man after my own heart, and he's right. It took the junior annotators about two hours to enter the first game, and Ravee entered the second one in about five minutes.

There's no formal break during the five games we play this afternoon, but there's a buffet set out for players to snack on between games. There's a variety of sandwiches, what I think are packages of chips, tea, coffee, water, and of course chilled jars of Brand's Extract. No one has asked me to mention Brand's Extract each round, but they're a ubiquitious presence here, so it's hard to avoid the subject. Someone was kind enough to explain to me this round that the Extract is in fact intended to be consumed as a cold beverage, and there's a baby food jar-sized container of it sitting in front of me to drink as soon as I screw up my courage. I'm told that it is made purely of chicken, and is in fact just chicken soup.

Another staffer noticed me looking dubiously at the sandwiches and asked if I would like some rice and chicken instead. Would I? Yum.

The top three players this round are Charnrit Khongthanarat (THA), Kien Hung Yeo (MYS) and Pakorn Nemitrmansuk (THA), heading up 27 players at 2-0. Eight players scored 500+ this round, down from ten in the previous round, because the first round paired players from the top quarter against the bottom quarter, and was more mismatched than the top vs. third quarter matches this round. One the other hand, there has been one tie each round so far, which is more than one would normally expect.