Galveston Round-up

Aight, it's been a long day. Been a good day, too. But a long day. We arrived in Phoenix from Tampa (via Atlanta) around midnight Arizona time Wednesday night. Collected our bags and enjoyed a bit of drama trying to collect our rental. ("This reservation isn't in your name, sir. Give me your driver's license, a credit card and your left foot, please.") Since nobody had dinner we hit the drive thru at a Jack-in-the-Box on the way to our hotel. ("I'll have a number 9 medium with curly fries and a root beer." "Will that complete your order?" "Not even close--") We rolled in around 1:30 am with a team text message letting us know we needed to be in the lobby at 6 am ready to go. Our first match of the day--at 8 am vs. Heat--was part of the last half day's prelims to be made up from the Galveston rain out. We played well enough to pull out a tight win not because we were playing particularly well but because the guys don't let the situation or the score get into their heads and they've been down before and know what it takes to pull games back. Next up for us is Upton 187 who played some tightly contested matches in Galveston and thumped Viscious earlier that morning. This is their first event as pros. With the Infamous win over Legion we were confident we knew how the seeding would break down and focused on improving from our first match. With a good win over 187 we were ready for "Sunday" play.
Before the first quarter-final match started we'd already been on site for seven and a half hours. We stayed in the shade as best we could and constantly encouraged the guys to drink more fluids. There were questions early on exactly how the quarters and semis would be seeded. Divisional has a formula but some of us (myself included) lobbied for a simple formula where the higher seed from bracket A would play the lower seed from bracket B and vice versa--but that ain't what happened. The reason for the suggested formula is to assure fresh match-ups and avoid circumstances like those that occurred when Infamous and Heat played a second match of the day against each other in the quarters. And the Ironmen played Thunder--a team they had also already played in Galveston. Hopefully common sense will prevail by Chicago. (I don't hold out any hopes for this weekend--at least in that respect.)
Moving into the semis was Ironmen and Heat. We played the 'Men and Dynasty played Heat. (Despite the fact the divisional formula seeded the "Sunday" teams for match-ups it doesn't re-seed after the quarters. Instead assigns the winner of the 3/6 match-up to the 2 seed and the winner of the 4/5 match-up to the 1 seed regardless of quarter-final results.)
The finals was us & Heat--who did a great job reaching the finals in their first pro event and will likely be a power to be reckoned with in the foreseeable future. By the finals we were working like a well-oiled machine and pulled out a couple of wrinkles we hoped Heat might not be expecting and took a somewhat misleading 7-1 win--most of the points were hotly contested--for our third PSP pro victory in a row.
And that was just Thursday.

PSP Phoenix begins tomorrow.