DBA Finals at RECON 03 Boyd Bruce IV (top left) and his father Boyd Bruce III square off in the finals. Bruce IV won. One might suspect that the fix was in. But both had to win earlier heats to get this far. An interesting finale to our first HMGS SOUTH DBA Tournament. On Saturday April 26th 2003, the first ever Florida DBA Championship was held at the RECON Gaming convention in Tampa Florida. The event was run by Martin Schmidt (2002 DBA NICT Champion) under the guidelines set by NASAMW for a NICT qualifier. Prizes were provided by Wargames Inc. The event drew eight participants from the HMGS and NASAMW (South and Deep South) Regions. This number equaled the number involved in the long established Armati Tourney also featured at Recon. The convention drew a record 413 attendees. An encouraging sign for gaming in the Central Florida area! The Format was 15mm Open for the preliminaries. The eight players went into two groups and played 'round robin' with their own armies. Group assignment was by random draw. Group A Boyd Bruce IV Northern Dynastic Chinese 2-1 Dan Halverson Phyrhic 2-1 Doug Hawes Tamil Indian 1-2 Allan Redmond II/36a Graeco-Bactrian 1-2 Group B Boyd Bruce III Post Mongol Samurai 2-1 Stephen Quintero Polybian Roman 2-1 Wayne Minton Marian Roman 2-1 Andrew Akridge Maurikian Byzantine 0-3 By VERY close tiebreaker, father and son advanced to the finals. The finals featured 25mm Imperial Roman troops provided by NASAMW and Derek Downs. The players had a core list of eight elements and chose options for the remaining four in secret. Deployment was also done double-blind. (When the troops where revealed both had chosen the same options!) In an exciting battle, the son defeated the father 4-2! To NASAMW Deep South and Florida State Champion: Boyd Bruce IV (age 11) Well done! Little Boyd took home the BIG trophy and a $25 Gift Certificate from Wargames Inc. Dad got the smaller trophy and a $15 gift certificate for 2nd place. $5 gift certificates were also awarded to Dan Halverson and Wayne Minton who did extremely well in this event. Both only missing the final by fractions of points. Dan had only learned the game that morning! I'd like to thank all the players for participating. I hope to see more of you at HURRICON!  Addendum. On June 1st, our friend Allan Redmond passed away in his sleep. Allan was a great gentleman and a good friend and will be greatly missed. We are dedicating the HURRICON DBA tournament to his memory. Back to Rebel Yell No. 23 Table of Contents Back to Rebel Yell List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by HMGS South This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com