Kaner & Amby fly to play in the Melbourne Open Diplomacy tournament. They get schooled but can they come good in the end?
Intro in the airport
Venue: Brisbane Airport
Drinks of choice:
Kaner & Amby - 150 Lashes Australian pale ale by James Squire Brewery
The guys are recording initially at the Brisbane domestic airport waiting for their flight to the Melbourne Open face-to-face tournament (0 mins 10 secs)
They discuss their hopes to catch up with players outside of the games (4 mins 20 secs)
Kaner talks about his return to the Melbourne “big smoke” talking about growing up in rural Victoria (6 mins 15 secs)
Kaner discusses the recently completed Divided States game drawn 3 way’s between Technostar (Kansas - 128 units), EmpireStrikesBack (Vermont - 78 units) and Tobi1 (New Hampshire - 73 units). It’s generally considered this particular game probably had the most SCs/units controlled by a player in any Diplomacy game (7 mins 50 secs - if edited out the bing bing)
They introduce their beers - more One Fifty Lashes from James Squire (11 mins 15 secs)
Kaner discussed the player positioning on the board (11 mins 30 secs)
By drawing the three players all got massive boosts to their rankings on vDip (13 mins 30 secs)
They then move onto Amby’s Divided States game and provide a brief update (15 mins)
Amby then goes onto discuss an anonymous game he’s in at vDip where he was doing well but has been massively stabbed (16 mins)
He then discusses his games at PlayDip including his 1900 game and some of the differences for this variant (18 mins)
Finally Amby moves onto his Fog of War game at vDip (25 mins 45 secs)
Kaner brings up discussions at vDip about points and suggestions (28 mins)
They touch on the Russian Diplomacy site moving web address (29 mins)
Kaner gives a long interesting story about him and ferrets (30 mins 30 secs)
They grab another beer and Kaner discusses how he hates plane flights (38 mins)
Kaner flags the search facility at vDip has recently changed (41 mins 30 secs)
Kaner is waiting on a Newspaper game to get going (44 mins)
The guys’ flight gets called but its so quiet they can’t hear the details. They wrap up this part of the show (45 mins 30 secs)

End of Day one at the Melbourne Open
Venue: Hop Sing, Melbourne
Drinks of choice:
Melissa Call - Cockfighters Ghost Pinot Gris
Everyone else - Furphy’s ale
Amby introduces the after-party - a table of 9 people at Hop Sing, Melbourne. 8 were players on Day 1 of the Melbourne Open tournament. Due to the size of the table the audio is  (48 mins)
People at the table are: Kaner, Melissa Call, Shane Cubas, Peter McNamara, Peter Novacco, Amby, Amelia, Tim Jones (ATinCan) and Brett Chatterton. Everyone is having Furphy’s ale and Melissa is having a Cockfighters Ghost Pinot Gris  (49 mins)
Peter is topping the board for Day 1 at 30 points, while Amby is a distant 2nd. Amby discusses the experience of playing face to face (51 mins)
Melissa flags how new face to face players who normally play online usually have a lot of trouble with the deadline (52 mins)
Amby raises the issue of misorders in face to face and spelling mistakes in orders (53 mins 30 secs)
They discuss how the order pace was much faster than any other tournament players had attended (54 mins 30 secs)
Amby learns about the importance of drafting your orders at the start of the turn rather than waiting to the end (55 mins)
Brett brings up Andrew Goff’s previous Flying Dutchman move in an earlier game (56 mins)
Amby asks about people’s learnings from the day (57 mins)
Kaner discusses how he managed to pull off a Key Lepanto (58 mins 30 secs)
Shane discusses Beer Diplomacy and its impact on the game (1 hr 0 mins)
Kaner talks about the stress factor of retreats and builds eating into the normal turn’s discussion time (1 hr 1 min)
Shane asks Amby and Kaner about their prior involvement in face to face (1 hr 2 mins)
They discuss who got stabbed and who stabbed well (1 hr 4 mins)
Tim outlines the Cricket scoring system for