We had such an amazing team. Everyone was working so hard, and we had about 50 people volunteering, with about 15-20 core folks. I think if you picked any other group of people on the planet and put them through what we went through, they would all have been at each other's throats by day 3. But throughout the whole event, I just wanted to hug everyone on our team. They're awesome.
With Matthew's late nights and excellent handling of the US Open, we actually started our 400+ person tournament on time every day. One day, we were even ready to go an hour early. Matthew squeezed in a half hour of sleep every once in a while, while Walther kept us all going (even encouraging our napping):
On Friday morning, when we came in, Matthew warned us that the playing room would be a disaster because they had Pair Go there last night. We walked in and it was pristene:
Andrew and his team had put everything back in place the night before. (Mostly because Andrew didn't trust us to do it right.)
We had some catastrophic equipment failures. I bought a new phone and new laptop on Tuesday because my aged machines just couldn't keep up with the pace. Andrew's shoes died, so he repaired them while waiting for his emergency replacement pair to arrive:
I didn't play any Go all week, except a few partial games at the bar. The exact number, like AlphaGo's future plans, is under discussion. This is about what Jason looked like to me each night as we recovered at the bar:
Matthew and Audrey definitely won the Pair Go tournament. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
Ritter 1 and Ritter 2 got the unenviable task of desperately trying not to miss any of the millions of people who should be on our thank-you list. But they were definitely the right people for the job because they had a significant group of their friends who helped out who don't even play Go.
It was absolutely impossible to get everyone to stop working long enough to get together for a picture, but here is a small subset of our team:
credit: James Pinkerton/American Go E-Journal
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