{"id":23802,"date":"2021-03-05T11:30:06","date_gmt":"2021-03-05T17:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brubakers.us\/?p=23802"},"modified":"2021-03-05T11:30:06","modified_gmt":"2021-03-05T17:30:06","slug":"chicken-n-pickle-mixed-competitive-leagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/?p=23802","title":{"rendered":"Chicken N Pickle Mixed Competitive Leagues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mixed competitive league night at Chicken N Pickle is one of my favorites. I&#8217;ve played it in when it was on a Thursday night, Sunday night, and now it&#8217;s on Tuesday nights. I&#8217;ve played in it with different partners. <\/p>\n<p>Tom was my first competitive league partner and together <a href=\"http:\/\/brubakers.us\/?p=23048\" >we were &#8220;Asian Invasion&#8221;<\/a>. He is my absolute favorite because he is a joy to play with. The best part about playing with Tom is that he&#8217;s made me love playing with lefties, which is a complete 180 from how I felt about lefties a year ago. I used to not like playing with them because I would get confused which balls were mine to take and which weren&#8217;t. But now I see playing with a lefty is more advantageous than not and I look forward to partnering up with lefty partners these days. <\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/ching\/50328469091\/in\/datetaken\/\"  title=\"Untitled\"><img src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/50328469091_3f01a7af73_c.jpg\" width=\"500\" alt=\"Untitled\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It was also my time playing with Tom that&#8217;s helped me get better at stacking and switching. I&#8217;ve learned so much from the times we&#8217;ve played together. <\/p>\n<p>Steve Vetter was my next partner after Tom. There are no pictures of us from league because <a href=\"http:\/\/brubakers.us\/?p=23190\" >Steve hates pictures and matching outfits<\/a>. He is also very good and fun to play with but pictures and matching outfits are kind of my thing so I felt like we were very incompatible. He at least let me name our team &#8220;Vetter Luck Next Time&#8221; so that was fun. I love clever team names.<\/p>\n<p>My next partner Jacob Thompson (from last session). I hadn&#8217;t really played with him much but I&#8217;d played with his dad Rick Thompson a lot over the summer when we were playing at 5 AM before work. Jacob was a really good sport. We wore our league shirts every night we played together and he didn&#8217;t complain about them. <\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/ching\/50975117061\/in\/datetaken\/\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  title=\"Untitled\"><img src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/50975117061_4071629fea_c.jpg\" width=\"500\" alt=\"Untitled\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>He let me name our team Short Stack &#8211; a name I borrowed from when Jocelyn Devilliers and Matt Conrad were playing together. I think it fit because I&#8217;m short and we stack. Jacob is also a lefty so it made perfect sense for us to stack and I felt it was very effective. I&#8217;m also playing with a lefty in Delray Beach for women&#8217;s doubles so it was great practice. I also had a bit of fun with our team shirts. I had &#8220;Shorty&#8221; printed on the back of my shirt and &#8220;Lefty&#8221; on Jacob&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/ching\/50998626781\/in\/datetaken\/\"  title=\"Untitled\"><img src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/50998626781_ed9cb68ebb_c.jpg\" width=\"500\" alt=\"Untitled\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>My latest partner is Dave New. We are playing in the current session as &#8220;New-B&#8221; for his last name and the first initial of my last name. It&#8217;s also a pun on the word &#8220;newbie&#8221; so whenever people ask who we are or who they&#8217;re playing against they&#8217;ll say the &#8220;New-Bs&#8221; &#8211; I&#8217;m so nerdy, I know. I love puns!<\/p>\n<p>Our first night of league was Tuesday. Dave cracked me up because he said he meant to sign up for the mid-level league and not the toughest one. He thought Mixed Advanced was higher than the Mixed Competitive league so that&#8217;s why he wanted to play in Mixed Competitive. It sure sounds like it but it&#8217;s actually the reverse. Mixed Advanced is in between Mixed Intermediate and Mixed Competitive so the Mixed Competitive league is the most challenging league at Chicken N Pickle. Though, honestly, none of the mixed leagues at Chicken N Pickle are really all that competitive. The best mixed league available right now in the area is the Monday night mixed league at Nahola.  <\/p>\n<p>I guess Dave wanted to pay in Mixed Advanced but he&#8217;s stuck with me now. Although I have noticed that a lot of the same people will play in both leagues. I feel like if you&#8217;re not quite sure where you fit skill-level-wise then it makes perfect sense to play in multiple leagues until you find the correct fit. I just kind of got stuck playing in Mixed Competitive because there was no Mixed Advanced group at the time and I had already outgrown the intermediate group but I will really play in any league that my partners want to play in. I just want to play. <\/p>\n<p>Until next time. GNG.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mixed competitive league night at Chicken N Pickle is one of my favorites. I&#8217;ve played it in when it was on a Thursday night, Sunday night, and now it&#8217;s on Tuesday nights. I&#8217;ve played in it with different partners. Tom was my first competitive league partner and together we were &#8220;Asian Invasion&#8221;. He is my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2304,262],"tags":[3163,2364,3137,3212],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23802"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23823,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23802\/revisions\/23823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}