2nd World Othello Championship
New York, October 29-30, 1978
The second World Championship was held in New York. Although there were national qualifications in fourteen countries the final participants were representatives from just nine countries: Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, the Philippines, Finland, Italy and Sweden.
Because of the issues with the European qualification tournament in 1977, with the qualified player refusing to travel to the WOC, Anjar Co., who was respopnsible for the WOC, decided there would no longer be any European qualification system. Every company with an Othello license was asked to organise a national qualification tournament and send the winner to the WOC.
WOC Qualification tournaments
Many licenced companies organised several qualification tournaments and a national championship final. In Sweden there were five qualification tournamments and over 300 players. The Swedish representative Gunnar Råbe won the Stockholm qualification tournament with 99 players. An interesting fact is that they did not use clocks. Each game was 12 minutes long, and when the 12 minutes were over all games were stopped, players needed to raise their hands, and they counted the discs. This meant it could be a good strategy to check when the tournament referee was about to hit the gong, and start to make the last move seconds before the time was out.
In Great Britain there were 12 qualification tournaments.
2nd WOC. USA
The WOC in New York had nine players. Instead of playing a round-robin, they paired the nine players in three groups with three players in each group. Each player played only two preliminary rounds.The final ranking was not based on wins but on total discs, and the four players with the best disc total advanced to the semi-finals.
| Pos. | Name | Country | Discs | Game 1 | Game 2 |
| 1 | Hidenori Maruoka | Japan | 112 | 60 | 52 |
| 2 | Carol Jacobs | USA | 85 | 48 | 37 |
| 3 | Jeff Davisson | Great Britain | 80 | 39 | 41 |
| 4 | Leve Arsenault | Canada | 65 | 25 | 40 |
| 5 | Thomas Heiberg | Norway | 61 | 4 | 57 |
| 6 | Gunnar Råbe | Sweden | 58 | 16 | 42 |
| 7 | Eduardo Enriquez | Phillippines | 49 | 27 | 22 |
| 8 | Kim Nyberg | Finland | 47 | 24 | 23 |
| 9 | Pier Morolli | Italy | 19 | 12 | 7 |
Japan's Hidenori Maruoka,16 years old, won the tournament undefeated winning all his games with more than 50 discs, and also won the second game of the finals 64-0 against the USA's Carol Jacobs (the only finals wipe-out in WOC history).
The players who did not reach the semi-finals only got to play a total of two games at the WOC, which allowed them do some early sightseeing in New York.
B: Maruoka - 60 W: Heyberg - 4 |
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B: Maruoka - 64 W: Jacob - 0 |