Last Saturday and Sunday, December 13 and 14, the Philippines Society of Information Technology Students (PSITS) held their annual sports fest at the Brokenshire College grounds. This was the first time that I ever attended the event. I did not attend the previous two years.
I signed up to compete on the word factory event. All the participating schools were divided into two Brackets, A and B. Schools from both brackets went through two elimination rounds with two games per round. The winner of each round would then advance to the next round while the loser was dropped from the competition. The eliminations was followed by the semi-finals, schools that have won twice were eligible to compete in the semi-finals. The winner of the semi-final round would then compete with the winner from the other Bracket for the championship while the loser of both Brackets would compete for the third and fourth place.
My school, University of Southeastern Philippines, was included in bracket A and on the first round of eliminations I was up against, Ian, a 4th year BSCS student from the University of the Philippines. On the first round our scores were very close to each other, 27 to 26, with me leading by only one point. On the second round I was able to spot more words than him enabling me to win the game. We ended the game with the score 67-51 in my favor.
On my second elimination match, my opponent from Jose Maria College did not appear, allowing me to win by default and giving me the chance to sail through the elimination rounds to the semi-finals with complete ease. ^_^
At the semi-finals, I was up against Sonito, a 4th year student from Ateneo de Davao University. On the first round he bested me by 6 points. He scored 22 points against my 16 points. I knew then that if I was going to proceed to the Championship I had to win the next round by more than 6 points. As the second round began and I saw the set of cubes in front of us and my hopes began to fade because it was a very difficult selection of lettered cubes. The chances of winning were slim and the chances of winning more than 6 points were even slimmer. I did my best and wrote down every word that I could find, and I knew that he also did the same. When the time came to check what we wrote we both discovered that he mistook the letter Z for an N. One of the rules of the game was that if a player wrote a word that could not be found in the selection then the corresponding points for that word would be subtracted to the player’s total. Because of this mistake, Sonito got a score of -1 for the second round and I was able to get 11 points. I was able to win the match with my 27 points to his 21 points. I won by 6 points. ^_^
For the Championship match, I was up against the winner of Bracket B, Rey, a 2nd year student of the University of Mindanao Matina Campus. On our first round I clearly won the match with me garnering 15 points to his 4 points. On our second round, I was again able to spot more words than him. When our total scores were tallied, I clearly won the game with a 20 point margin between us making me the Champion of the Word Factory event.
I was very pleased of the outcome of that day with me, a new comer, winning the CHAMPIONSHIP for one of the disputed games of the annual event. ^_^ I thank the Lord for giving me this honor.
