Results and links to replays can be found here.
Heading into the individual tournament, we had 2 representatives in the top 16 - one each from Canada and the United States. Before things started, there was a bit of a hiccup as the 7th place player from Japan was actually a no-show. While a staff member was put in to replace the missing player going forward the players just missing will probably be asked to be subs in case something similar happens.
To the quarterfinals though and the USA representative xGeo (George Liu-Krason) was basically involved in a 3-way beatdown of the 16th place participant cutieboy (Woo-Jin Choi - KOR). George was holding onto the lead, but in the final 2 hands he wound up paying in, including an unfortunate riichi then paying in on his next draw to finish outside the top 2.
For Canada's Khold (Simon Chen), it was a successful, but perhaps bizarre game. He led wire to wire, won just 3 hands, all of them were by tsumo's, and most bizarre of all - all were either via haitei ryaoue, or in the case of all last - a penultimate tille tsumo-haitei-chitoitsu.
That earned him a 1st and into the semfinals, but it was not as easy. In fact, heading into S2 he was yakitori and 18700 points from 2nd place. But after a ryuukoku, Simon is able to draw the right side of his 2 sided wait for sanshouku for an oya-mangan He'd close out the game with another win, securing his 2nd place finish and a spot in the final table.
If the finals were one hanchan only, Simon would have won the title. 4 hands went for mangan and three of those belonged to him, giving him a 51.7 score and a 35 point lead over 2nd. However, the finals were an aggregate of 2 hanchan - though all he'd have to do avoid is a last place finish and he would probably secure the title.
Unfortunately for him, he never got any traction in the 2nd hanchan. In E1-1, soraru (Lulu Zhou - CHN) would tsumo a haneman while Simon was oya. And in S-1, Karlocia (Karolina Trepinska - FRA) would tsumo an oya-baiman. As a result of that, Simon could not avoid finishing in last, and in fact the order of the first hanchan was reversed in the 2nd. But due to Simon's loss being greater, he fell from 1st to a tie for 3rd as soraru would combine her 2nd and 3rd place finishes to win by 0.4 points.
While certainly it is not the result either player wanted, it was still very impressive that we had 2 players competing here earlier today. Congratulations to our participants and we'll look to build for next year!