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naw i was just visiting. if you visit your folks that means you come through Toronto right? give us a headsup!

i saw chukkerv and trevor in montreal today. matt's turning 40 tomorrow eh.

I drove up Mont Ventoux in Fall 2008. It was really hard, i had to keep pushing on the gas pedal the whole time.

No but seriously this trip looks totally amazing. Thinking about it.

1. Todd - Ben Schultz, Brian Dillman, and I think Kev Walsh. (Another super team)
   
2. Mrak&Ade - Kev Walsh, Ngaihon + 1, Oli (K'ruhe), & Flo (Monkey Punch)
   
   
   

hmmm, looks like i'll be sleeping around that weekend.

We are stoked to have you, old boy. Who are you playing with (here and Worlds)?

In London with Schultz and Dillman. Midwest OG!
Geneva will be 100% BPTO, Maija and Ngaihon.

I dont think good bike control should be punished by a warning kev. The rule states into another player's bike, not towards another player's bike.

Warnings should be used for talking back to ref, time wasting, jumping the charge etc, things which are petty but might affect the game.

If the game is affected, call a real penalty.

A warning is not a punishment, and should never be used that way. Otherwise it'll just spiral, and people will get the idea "i'll just get warned, no big deal".

In my dolphin slap example, i meant situations where it's just luck that the other player was not slapped--perhaps they hopped or steered out of the way, or perhaps a reckless endo where the player was clearly out of control just happened to land short. The ref should be able to recognize the difference... anyway i don't think warnings are important, i was just trying to give an example of one of the times i'd consider warning someone. i find yelling at players on the court is generally not useful.

Polo was not borderline, very definitely bre aking rules here there and everywhere but because he broke many rules once and not the same rule many times it did not get called so much (I think Max warned him about it though?)

Yeah "warnings" usually accomplish nothing. They should only be used when a rule is NOT broken but almost broken, like a dolphin slap that stops right before impact.

I am seriously stoked about coming back to London to play in a tournament. Three years is too long!

The late bets win hmmmmmmm

Haha, yeah well when all the bets were in (on LFGSS anyway), all the teams that had been picked were still in, and mostly in winners' bracket. Interesting to see how few ppl picked l'Équipe!

modicum of procedural intelligence

Sounds like a good team name to me, or the name of a slate running for the European Hardcourt Central Committee or whatever it's going to be called.

Chan - Cocorico/Spring
Rik - L¨Equip/Call me Dady
BoozeOtter - Spring Break Vs Hooks
Stingray - Call me Daddy / Hooks
Hyper - Spring Break / Call me daddy
Sandy - Spring Break / Edison
danwentskiing - Edisons/Hooks
Harvey - Equipe v Hooks
John H - Edisons v Call Me Daddy.
Rik Call me Daddy Edisons
Kev - Edisons v Call Me Daddy

It could do it, Vince has been testing it out. But that's not really an issue with Podium, that's an issue with people not understanding MB, and it's advantages. I've heard lots of comments about "Challonge's crazy ranking".

Yeah, there are problems with MB as well, no system is perfect. Theoretically outliers (games with best outcome and worst outcome) should be ignored, which at many tournaments leaves only 3 games to judge by.

I just posted this on the thread about swiss rounds on LOBP:

If you look at the rankings produced by Podium for NAHBPC double elim, you'll see they pretty closely reflect the final results produced by double elim. The top ranked team won, the top 6 all finished top 6, and 13 of the top 16 after swiss rounds finished in top 16....

London feedback coming soon Kev, people are reacting to the rules in the LHBPA forum (nothing bad, although we think the helmet certification is silly).

Cool, yeah that was a typo or some artefact of collaborative editing, it's something we had decided to get rid of, not sure how it slipped through....

There will be modifications before they're voted on, based on feedback.

oh yeah and i made Jono the "manager" for London, after Emilie asked to be removed. not that it means much, you can just edit the club listing.

You alls (Vidal that's my Wisconsin talkin) don't even post all your tournaments, if you did LDN would be off the charts i should think. Feel free to post past tournaments that don't already show up here.

I have emailed you at least once (possibly twice) in the last 6 months asking if it was possible to have some sort of dialogue.

Yeah i just found a one line email from August 30, i apologize that fell through the cracks.

Orly? And how will this rule be accepted? Is there a mechanism by which we can engage with the NAH? At the moment it's just one way traffic.

You took what i said out of context. I specifically said that the foul you and Jon would call is not in either NAH or EHBPC ruleset, and if it has any hope in becoming a rule, writing it out concisely would be a good start. I personally think that EHBPC ruleset is very nicely written, if they rulesets are going to get combined, i (personally) would want to look to it as a starting point.

To respond more specifically, there are avenues to talk to NAH about rules, which i've told you about in the past, although as long ago as Grief Masters in February 2009 you specifically told me you had no interest in doing so. It seems like maybe that has changed.

People need to stop making assumptions about NA polo just by reading a small minority of threads on LOBP.

fixed.

Fuck off Kev...

Really?

I'm not arguing for a right of way rule

Then there's a major misunderstanding going on in that thread, which sucks, cause now we're yelling at each other :-)

BTW, hypothetically, if you were arguing for a right of way rule in certain circumstances of play, i would potentially support it. Not that i have any sway on rules....

I'm not giving anyone the wrong impression.

I'm just not a big fan of the "NA vs Europe" discourse, it's not constructive, it's boring, and often based on internet misunderstandings or weird videos. Come hang out here!

I'm stepping down as a ref in light of the NA debate (I have a feeling Bill will too), I don't think I am helping the London scene develop if the front wheel advantage/cutting a line NA approach is the future of polo..

Gotta call BS here Jono, the two European players who were involved in this controversial play are not convinced this was a foul, either. And as I keep saying, neither the EHBPC nor NAH rules state that the player with the ball has a rigt of way. If you think that's wrong, then come up with a rule, don't leave it in the ref's discretion to say its a "dangerous play". The more that is left to the refs discretion, the harder it will be to enforce rules.

I think you also need to recognize that early on, well before we had refs or tournaments that had more than 10 teams, a need was felt to distinguish hardcourt from grass, and for better or worse the difference regarding "right of way" was one of those distinctions. As someone who initially played grass (although a relatively anarchic version of it, with Vidal for example), I never felt this need. But the distinction is part of the history of hardcourt, and that history is felt more in some places than others. So to change tha (and most people think the sport should continue ti evolve), you'd have to be pretty deliberate, explicit, etc.

Also, you should really come play a bunch in NA, or talk more to people who have played a lot here, I think you have (and are giving others) the wrong impression.

Clean play is one of the main reasons london has such a large and happy scene. It would be sad if London ever forgot this in hope of the podium.

I don't think it's true. I think it's because you're quite friendly people (except for that guy Ray, he's a douche. Oh and Vidal.), and it's an enormous city with a huge cycling community and a disproportionately high number of people in the polo playing demographic.

The kind of physicality that shows up in some of these high profile games is not the way most people play pickup, and it's mainly via pickup that scenes get to be "large and happy", right?

Kev, I just re-read the posts, there are two instances of generalisations ("North American" and not "Canucks" and "Americans should know their rules"). There's also an instance of a guy who experienced some tricky forearm action from an American when they visited Europe (not a generalisation), that's it after ~200 odd posts...

Fair enough, perhaps there's only a couple of direct mentions like that, but many posts seem to follow from those.

Let's keep things in perspective, we reacted to a "dirty" final and then discussed some forearm and blocking rules/plays, no-one's hating on the Americans... although most people were shocked that CC weren't called on the fouls (and CMD too, although we've experienced how they play at the Euros and felt they were the cleaner team in Mr Do's edit, at that specific angle, etc).

Yeah, i'd say CMD were the cleaner team in this game, but only marginally. That said, they also are the first to get their elbows up, escalating things. Same thing happened in my game against CMD. I got elbowed, went down, got scored on, and responded by delivering a nasty (if legal) shoulder check.

There is no "us and them" in my opinion (home team support/cheers excluded) and I'd hope that everyone agrees the final should have been a cleaner affair (showing the sport at it's finest, being ambassadors, setting an example, etc). Time will tell if it's had an impact on the sport, do you feel it was a "good" final for the development of bike polo..?

As i said above this was the most physical final i've seen in awhile at any tourney. Mr Do captures lots of stuff that should be illegal, some of which the ref probably saw and should have called. Some of which no has never been outlawed, as far as i know (such as purposely directing a fall so that you knock an opponent down, which is still in the realm of "dick move", but not specifically illegal).

I'd probably evaluate the whole tourney's impact rather than the final. I can tell you these two teams didn't make it to the final playing aggressive like this the whole way.

True that maybe we've focussed on the fouls/drama a little (there was loads of sweet polo played in the final after all), but that's bound to happen for the final of Worlds, don't you think?

I think it's bound to happen when you're all so gutted for not being there :-) You missed an amazing event that raised a lot of standards. 2012!!!!

Calling fouls and stopping play makes for good polo.

+1

Wow, i love reading the massive generalisations throughout this thread. A few people seem really keen on analysing this one game to death, and arriving at far-reaching conclusions about The State of Bike Polo, or, The Differences Between "N.A." and "European" Bike Polo... as if Crazy Canucks' or CMD's style exemplifies a standardized style played on each continent ... as if there are not dozens of styles of polo on each continent, never mind country or city.

This was an entertaining game, but it was also the most physical final i've seen in a tournament in a while. If i recall correctly, none of last dozen games at NAHBPC had this level of body-on-body or bike-on-bike contact. Definitely not the podium games, one of which involved Crazy Canucks. Beaver Boys (who seem to be getting some blame due to the "buffer zone" quote) vs Machine Politics in the 2010 WHBPC final didn't have this kind of physicality either.

I'm not saying this to "defend" N.A. polo (i don't really care), i'm just pointing out that these simple Us and Them narratives are facile, distracting, and unhelpful. Guess what? There are players who play physically all over the world, and there are players that skirt rules all over the world. Occasionally players who skirt rules can elicit physical play by their opponents, and players who play physical can elicit the skirting of rules by their opponents, etc etc...

All that said, I agree with a lot of the specific points people are making about what could/should have been called a penalty, and i think most refs at the WHBPC would as well, but hindsight on video camera is very different than reffing a game with 500 screaming people, players that can't hear you, and a mid-court vantage point that is almost always behind the play (i think we need to move to having two head refs, each at 1/3 mark... but that's another story). Also, to correct a point made above, Ben Schultz from Chicago reffed the final game. Martin from East Van was the timer, and he hopped out on the court to wave off Greg's goal, to make clear that it had happened several seconds after time had expired.