It almost went unnoticed, but Global Challenge 18 has its first two Immortals. Hot on the heels of each other, bszpak from The Devil's Advocates and jules44 from classicalmusic/mensan have crossed the line.

What's even more impressive - bszpak is a first time Immortal who is running in first place right now. However the championship race for this GC is still extremely tight and might come down to the very last set!

The two of them have a quite massive lead over the third place player, so it will likely be a few more days until we get the next Immortal.

Congratulations to both and good luck to you in the closest championship race we had in years!

Congrats to you both! I have been watching, waiting for bzspak to pass jules. He finally did it. :P

In any case, congrats, that is NOT an easy achievement, and the two of you did it so quickly!


I was going for immortal, but I don't score very well in later levels, and missed a set, and dropped out of even the top 100. So I gave up. Haha.

Anyway, awesome job, you guys!

I don't know what has happened to me this year, but I am worn out too and gave up on the GC, which is the first time I've done that since finding the game years ago. Double congratulations to the two Immortals who have left the rest of the players in the dust, struggling to catch up.

Great job to both! That was smoking fast!

Don't worry, several people have to take a break, myself included! I chuntered to div 5 or 6 on hardcore this time, looked at the league tables and decided it wasn't happening, then reset for challenge purposes.

Upshot of that is you can go in on the next one and start on a high which is a good morale booster for the longterm.

Good luck to the Immortals-to-be still plugging away...

I'm watching the duel between the two immortals with great interest. I'm also hanging in there wondering if this time I may manage to go up to a new high into level 9. I do have one question regarding my average score. According to thestats on my team page my avergae is approx 850, but on the global challenge stat page, for the same number of games played (1216) the average is 1015! Can anyone shed some light on how this can be? Thanks. Riodice

I have only played in two of these tournaments, and both times it seems I always come in late. I made it to level 8 the 1st time, so, I figure if I played when it started I might actually make it to 10 but by a sliver of a chance. Probably just halfway through 9.

I could be wrong, though.

-Nam

We have a second new Immortal - TheCrazedOne made it across the line.

In addition, a dozen of repeat Immortals have completed the race: rbearusa, ghosttowner, bubblesfun, JeffPearce, KayceeKool, Dreamcoat, Emma-Jane, postcards2go, raffucci, alan56, mfc and magijoh1.

The championship is still far from being decided - this GC might run into the holidays - I expect the last day to be between the 24th and 27th of December!

If it ends on the last day of your range, it'll end on my birthday...the 27th.

The 27th is my birthday too dg dave.

It's looking to finish on the 24th or even on the 23rd - just over half of the new Immortals (16) are now over the line and the rest is going into the final turns of the track. So all those of you who feared they might have to play over the holidays themselves - most likely it won't have to be.

Looks like it should END TODAY, after the first round. I count 32 new Immortals at the time of this post. Congrats to all.

It can't stop then, I'm half way through today's challenge!

Thanks for the email Wes -- I would have totally forgotten to end it!

The GC just hit 30 immortals so it ends now. Congrats to the winners, and I'll have final results up shortly.

T

I bought that challenge, I've been robbed!

(But well done to all the new Immortals and to everyone who got Hardcore. )

Bad luck floppy! In theory, daily challenges from this point on should not deal with the global challenge. Hopefully.

At least it wasn't an Epic, then I might have been really p**... irritated.

Dominate the global challenge! Collect at least 13233 points playing Global Challenge games today.


How??

An unfortunate case of bad luck, Gracie. that shouldn't be given until next global, though.

Which is when? I'm gonna be an immortal hardcore this time, gosh darn it.

All badges have been dispatched to the respective winners - 32 new Immortals and 10 new Hardcore Champions.

The unlucky 11th in Hardcore and a very honorable mention goes to dsimpy who missed the HC top 10 by just a hair - less than 4,000 points of a difference on a score of 1.8 million!

Thanks for the mention Wes! It was going to come down to whether it was me or my team mate BxBarracuda who got the final HC spot, so that meliorates any slight disappointment I could have felt, that another CM/Mer was successful.

And then there's next time ...

Congratulations, all. And looking forward to the next one!

Terry, any ideas on when the starting flag will drop again?

The page says late January - I would assume the usual four week break, so you might want to prepare for around the 20th. This is the best guess we have right now.

I learnt something myself about the rating game, as having completed the full journey twice I now play normal mode to get up the ratings instead. I knew how to get there but advice to anyone else, stop when you're ahead. When I reached div 8 in the top 40 or so it took a week to drop off the list entirely as unless you play that far regularly the questions were entirely new for enough topics to send me back to square one. It's a totally different strategy than immortal and as I've discovered can mean playing a lot less to do well than every single game.

Well done to all, and one day I'll go for that hard core again whatever the chances...

Terry/Wes,

Any plans on reopening the torture chamber soon? I want the hard-core badge!

If I had the keys, I'd unlock it next Monday

Looks like the guy with the key will unlock it Monday.

Yep, Monday start.

And GC 19 has begun. Good luck all!

Terry, GC 18 winners are still missing off the Hall of Fame page. Can you fix that?