I have the silver locked up and will be trying to apply the proper alchemical formulae to transmute it into gold on Thursday. My first match last night was a throwaway: 15-6, 15-1. The six points he got in the first game were all due to me punching his serves into the floor. He had showed up early, and the match was quick, so I had lots of time to size up my next opponent — I watched his entire match.
Unfortunately, I didn’t figure out that he was far more vulnerable to lob serves than drive serves until halfway through my second game with him. Fortunately, it didn’t matter that much. I beat him 15-8, 15-6. The games were closer than the score; he took service away from me a lot with excellent serve returns but was unable to capitalize and convert that into points. He was a real nice guy and we talked quite a bit afterwards. Like what seems to be the majority of players in Corporate Challenge racquetball, he was also a software engineer, so we had some nice conversation about work experiences. He’ll be playing for the bronze on Thursday, and I hope he wins. I tried to give him as much advice on his upcoming opponent (a poor sport that gives racquetball a bad name) as possible to help him out.
The final match on Thursday should be very interesting. I got a chance to watch my opponent for the finals, and he’s about as fast as me, has the same type of strengths I do and as near as I can tell is right around the same skill level. I’m looking forward to an epic match.