Competitive Play
Although tiddlywinks nowadays is a singles or pairs game, competition in the 1950s through the 1980s centred on team competition, with teams consisting of several (three or four) pairs. There were a number of university teams, and international matches were also played. More recently, singles and pairs tournaments have come to be the focus of competitive tiddlywinks, with only a few team matches being played each year. The four most prestigious tournaments are the National Singles and National Pairs tournaments held in England and the USA. The World Singles and World Pairs championships operate on a challenge basis; anyone winning a national tournament (or being the highest-placed home player behind a foreign winner) is entitled to challenge the current champion.
There are several other less prestigious tournaments in England and the USA throughout the year, often with a format designed to encourage inexperienced players. The results of tournaments and World Championship matches are used to calculate Tiddlywinks Ratings, which give a ranking of players. Typically there are about 120 players in the Ratings system.
Read more about this topic: Tiddlywinks
Famous quotes containing the words competitive and/or play:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“‘Oh beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,
Play the Dead March as you carry me along;
Take me to the green valley, there lay the sod o’er me,
For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.”
—Unknown. As I Walked Out in the Streets of Laredo (l. 5–8)