So, go and check it out. Lots of awards for the new and upcoming players. The established top players were still more succesful at the bigger awards though.
And also this time, there were lots of heavily contested awards that took us a lot of discussing. So, don't be too disappointed if you didn't win an award. You'll get new chances in the future. And even if you get beaten by someone else for an award, your efforts still get rewarded by all those ranking points you get... :-)
Australia
Lucas Oliver takes the Wario Stadium Autralian record away from Alex Penex, with a time of 4'26"49. Alex is now down to 16 NS records, Greg Lewis has 9, Lucas Oliver 4 and Ben Miller 3.
France
Jonathan Rolandez has made some great progress over the last few weeks, becoming France's best player in both NS and SC. He now holds most national records (29 in total).
Germany
Lots of action from Germany. Florian Eisele, Willi Rossberg and Kristopher Will have all been very
active lately, and are battling it out for the German records. Dimitrij Jarowoj disappears from the
records table, as all 3 of his records have been broken: on KTB and BB by Florian (1'38"28 and
2'07"91) and on RRo flap by Willi (2'00"14). Kristopher goes under the minute to claim the TT flap
record (59"99), and earns the SL record as well (1'59"46). He however loses his RRo NR to Willi
(6'03"46), who has made the biggest impact: CM flap, WS flap, BC flap, DK and BB flap are now all
his. He has also been active in the shortcut ranks, claiming no less than 15 records. Wolfgang Peter is left with just 3 records.
United States
Only 1 new US record, but what a great time this is: 17"68 by Myles Bukrim on CM flap, more than 2 seconds faster than Steven Gutierrez's previous record !
Nordic Records
A very strong run on Luigi Raceway (1'58"95) allows Finn Berger to edge just ahead of Tuomas Dunkel and reclaim the Nordic record on that course. He now has 3 records, with KD flap and MR.
All other courses are dominated by Tuomas Dunkel.
Kansas
Craig Lubbers is slowly becoming Kansas' best karter. He's not there yet, as Todd Worcester still holds most records. Craig had 7 state records on the last update, he now has 8, thanks to a new NR on BC flap: 37"17.
Massachussetts
Pat Bertovich takes a state record away from Sean Sullivan: 3'56"04, and that's on Rainbow Road, shortcut mode.
Women's WRs
That page doesn't get updated automatically. At the beginning of the year Lauren Soutar sent some of her times, and 12 of them were women's WRs. More info here.
The national records pages will be updated once a month, by myself initially, and then by someone else. There are 3 things that I'd like to put into place:
-AvgFin rankings for all countries and states
-tied WRs
-a system that'll list all the new records. Currently writing an update isn't easy, as I have to check each
records page manually for new records. So if your new record didn't get any mention, please don't be too hard on me :)
I won't give myself any deadline for these improvements, because I'll be quite busy over the next few months. But the first 2 shouldn't take too much time to get done.
Now, onto the citizenship/stateship issue. I have thought this over, and these are the rules I came up
with:
1. No karter is allowed to have his times shown on 2 different ranking tables. A French karter moving
to Germany will not be eligible for the French and German records. Likewise, an American or Canadian citizen cannot have state records in more than 1 state.
2. If a karter has moved to a different country/state for an extended period of time, he will then be able
to choose for which country/state he wants to compete. What I mean by "extended period of time" is at least 2-3 years. So if you've just moved in another country because you intend to live there for at least 2-3 years, then you can choose. This excludes tourism or going to college for 1 or 2 semesters.
The location where the record was set is meaningless. The logic behind this is that if a Swiss athlete beats the Swiss national record outside Switzerland, it will still be considered as a new Swiss national record.
If you have moved away for an extended period of time, just send a mail to yahoogroups indicating your change of location, and the changes will be made the next time the NR pages are updated.
Karlo Tomazelli and Myles Bukrim hit a #2 ranked times on CM SC flap and WS SC 3lap respectively.
Jesse Hristovski passed Dubreuil for 30th place, right behind Finn Berger. Finn doesn't seem to be a slow-moving object anymore these days though...
Mid-Eliters Roland Wehner, Pat Bertovich, Stephen Meakings and Vincent v/d Fluit all put in some PRs and ARR improvements, without reaching a new rank (yet).
Hassel Lezcano improved from Master D to Elite F. He's exactly 1 place ahead of Ignacio Lezcano, so he's the highest ranked player from Nicaragua now.
The newer guys Fabio Ferreira and Glyn Valentine are jumping up the rankings fast. They're ranked pro C and Semi-Pro C now. Expert B player George Dimitriou also improved a little.
Other actives were Lucas Oliver, Vincent Tolhuis, Kyle J. Smith, Roland Wehner and Matthew Little.
Due to this new WR Karlo is now up to 7 total WRs strenghtening his 2nd place. Also that was Penev's last WR so he's disappearing from the chart.
PS: if you also play other Mario Kart games, you might be interested in having a look at the renewed Combined Mario Kart Rankings.
In the Legend D rivalry, Vincent Tolhuis and Josh Layne continued their close battle. Josh took 3 records from Vincent and one from David to pass Vincent and take 1st pace. But Vincent got PRs as well including taking CM flap record from Josh, and got his first place spot back again, although it is still very close.
The King rivalry was super active. Willi Rossberg improved his rivaly record count by four and got his AF ddown to almost 2.00. John Santamaria was quite active as well, making the gap between himself and 3rd place almost a full rivalry AF point. Matthew Little had one PR but fell down to 5th place in the rivalry due to Kristopher Will's improvements. Kristopher got both KD and TT records, and passed Matthew as well as Craig Lubbers to get into 3rd place. A sign of how active this rivalry was this week: Craig Lubbers, who was inactive, had his AF increase over 0.50 points, compared to about 0.10 points that inactive rivals would get in other rivalries. Another interesting piece of trivia to show how close these rivals are: the top 4 KD flap times in this rivalry are 33"33, 34, 36, and 37. This record changed hands twice, first Willi taking it from Matthew and then Kristopher from Willi.
Then yesterday Myles striked again on CM sc Flap this time lowering Penev's old WR by 0"34 to get a time just over the 19 seconds barrier at 19"03. A bit later he had it under the 19 seconds with an already impressive 18"66 lap. But of course he couldn't stop there and improved it again today this time under the 18 seconds! So the WR now stands at 17"68*. That means a 1"67 lead on the 2nd place of Penev and that's for a Flap :). Myles found out you could take the first shortcut without a shroom which let him use it somewhere which is actually useful rather then in a wall. Well done Myles!
With these Myles is now tied for 3rd place with Greg and Penev is now down to only 1 WR in 10th place.
After a long 8-year karting career with many ups and downs, Kevin Booth demonstrated to us that he is still able to hit competitive PRs. He passed Tuomas Dunkel and Alex Penev on the AvgFin rankings to go from #14 to #12. Impressive job!
And another interesting thing:
Look at all the orange, red and yellow colors in the King A ranks! Lots of very active players there. John Santamaria made a huge jump in the past 4 days to join the pack. Pier-Yves Lemire just returned from inactivity and it turns out he's just leading the group on the ARR list. Will be interesting to see how many of these players are going to reach Legend before the end of this year...
In the Legend+ rivalry, Eddie Taylor got some PRs at WS which finally made him an actual Legend+.
In the Legend B rivalry, Finn Berger improved his already strong LR 3lap record to a Legend A time.
In the Legend D rivalry, both Vincent Tolhuis and Josh Layne were active. Among other PRs, Vincent took Josh's SL 3lap record. Josh more than got even, though, taking the SL 3lap record back, and SL flap, FS flap, and YV flap along with it. Josh also took both CM records from David. Josh and Vincent are much closer in AF now, and you can follow their battle better in the messageboard topic.
The biggest activity definitely happened in the King rivalry. First, Kristopher Will was swapped in for Karl Makatenas. This for some reason really hurt Matthew Little's AF, but not Craig Lubbers'. Therefore, Craig passed Matthew for 1st place in the rivalry without being active. The activity was done by Willi Rossberg and John Santamaria. Willi passed John, Matthew, and Craig to move from 4th to 1st place in the rivalry, cutting off 0.75 points from his rivalry AF and taking 6 new rivalry records in the process!! This pushed John down to 4th place, but then he made a run of his own. John got rid of a lot of his older Elite times, and took 3 records from Craig, to pass both Mattew and Craig and move into 2nd place behind Willi. These two are really on fire and could reach the Legend ranks soon if they keep this up.
Legends
Cooper Lovera continued his strong comeback with more quality PRs that showed his large potential. Vincent Tolhuis and Josh Layne continued making their huge ranking jumps. Both improved more than half of a letter rank, with Tolhuis reaching Legend C. Trystan Pugh, Eddie Taylor and Finn Berger made some stats improvements withouth passing anyone on the rankings (yet).
Kings
Three King players improved more than a full ARR point: Willy Rossberg (King D to King B), Richard Karlsson (King F to King C!) and Andre Hermanny (Elite A to King F). Three other players improved 0.500 ARR points or more: Florian Eisele, John Santamaria and Kyle Smith. Sometimes improvements of 0.5 ARR points can be good enough to be a POW candidate. This week people who do that just get overshadowed by various other players...
And let's not forget one new player who jumped straight to King A level: Henrik Norgren from Sweden. He's a top 10 Goldeneye player so he sure knows how to handle a controller...
Other active Kings were Jonathan Rolandez, Craig Lubbers, Kristopher Will and Pat Bertovich (shortcut).
Elites
Another new member, Matt Ruttkowski from the USA, also decided to completely skip the lower ranks and started his MK64 career as an Elite F player. Two other people entered the elite ranks: Michael Farmer went from Master F to Elite F and Hedley Hichens went from Master B to Elite F. Stephen Meakings was the other active Elite player.
Sub-Elite
Not many active players left who haven't reached Elite yet. Fabio Ferreira improved his nonSC rank to Advanced C, and reached an Elite F rank in shortcut. So he's actually not a sub-elite player anymore... Fabio also entered the universal ranking pages since he had a complete set of 52 times.
First I’d like to mention Michael Liem, it seemed to me a bit as though I wrote one update and I got praised much more than him, yet he’s doing most of the work and has been around much longer. Of course I have no problem at all with compliments, as long as others get the deserved respect. Think about it ;-)
Movement:
#2 Karlo Tomazelli didn't keep his nonsc positive this month, but became #1 in sc! YEA!
Moving on, the first nonsc person to catch my attention is #10 Trystan Pugh. Top 10, at the cost of Steven Zwartjes who has finally been kicked out after multiple years of inactiveness. I can’t remember Trystans exact goals, but I believe top 10 before 2006 was one of them, great job!
Just a bit lower, two veterans returned with a small comeback. #14 Kevin Booth and #20 Cooper Lovera returned with some prs to keep their af change positive this month! I hope Kevin isn’t going to stop here, now that he is only 0.2 points away from passing both Tuomas Dunkel and Alex Penev!
Out of the four I mentioned last month as the people to watch out for, three were active again. Again #19 Lucas Oliver made the biggest cut out of them, while Eddie and Myles barely kept their scores positive and Greg Lewis wasn’t active at all. He didn’t pass anyone with his 11% cut, but he’s a lot closer to #18 Mike Simmons and #17 Greg Lewis. Another two months like this and he’s top 15!
#50 Josh Layne is making scary cuts. Last months cut was 45%, this month 36%… but he’s much higher in the field now! #46 Vincent Tolhuis better start karting more if he wants to stay ahead; while his cut was nice, it won’t be enough to fend off Josh for the last month of 2005. However he also got a good cut in sc, so maybe he just spread his focus. Josh his “cut of insanity” made him pass 24 people. I hope we haven’t seen the last of him!
#64 Jonathan Rolandez and #79 Craig Lubbers both made some nice cuts. Jonathan actually passed Craig, which is quite good considering Craig cut off more than 20% of his af. He even squeezed in some shortcut prs to go! By their current place you wouldn’t even notice, but this month they both entered the top 100!
Finally it seems France is sending some people to dominate the mk64 scene. #82 Marc Pouget and #93 Clement Lafont (oh they’re French, just look at their names :P) both join the site in the top 100! Germany seems jealous, so they set #87 Willi Rossberg and #99 Kristopher Will on it. These guys also made it top 100 for the first time! It’s going so fast I haven’t even noticed the moment #104 Eise Smit left the top 100. The top 100 got quite a bit stronger this month, everyone contributing to it can have a cookie. Especially Kristopher, because he’s so cool and cut over 30% which is always impressive.
Anyway, France vs. Germany. #125 Andre Hermanny did great too. He’s still a bit behind the top 100 but can you blame him, he had to come from the very high 100s!
“Kyle Smith” whom I was very praising about last month actually turned out to have a stuntdouble, causing us all to think he was some kind of alien. Not to worry, he’s just human and the problem is solved now. I wish someone else had my exact name, I could have my initials on the site, they’re really cool and very important (hint)! If you have a clue what they are email me and you get mentioned next update. If no one guesses by the end of the month I’ll hand out another hint.
Honorable mentions:
#163 Sjoerd Werkhoven (got very close to passing me and had a great cut), #170 Stephen Meakings (starting to warm up).
New players:
Marc Pouget (PAL) King C!!
Clement Lafont (PAL) King D!
Roland Wehner (PAL) Elite C
Hedley Hichens (NTSC) Master B
Ryan Meade (NTSC) Expert A
Jack Porter (NTSC) Adv. A
Fabio Ferreira (NTSC) Adv. B
Kristopher Will and Andre Hermanny are interested in having a rivalry, but they need at least a third rival. If any high elites or low kings would like to join a rivalry with these two, please post in the Rivalries topic on the message board or send me an email.
