Tiddlywinkers Crush Cornell

It was a grand day for Harvard tiddlywinks wonks.

The Gargoyle Undergraduate Tiddlywinks Society, which was crushed by two Canadian teams February 26 after three years without a loss pounced on a team from Cornell Saturday and mauled them 43 1/2 to 19 1/2.

"We really slaughtered them," Mike Gottesman, president of the Gargoyle and captain of the team said Sunday.

The GUTS team played a wide-open brawling game. They switched from last week's squopp-squopp tactics -- where both team members try to cover the opposition's pieces with their own winks and shoot for the pot only late in the game -- to squidge-squopp. In this style of play, one man tries to neutralize the opposition by squopping, while his teammate goes for the score.

Squopp-Squopp vs. Squidge-Squopp

A squopp-squopp team plays a precise, defensive game, something like the way Floyd Patterson boxes; a squidge-squopp team uses the tactics Sonny Liston made famous in his prime -- pounding the opposition into the mat.

A last-minute snarl-up almost kept the winks grounded. The Cornell team had agreed to bring two three-by-six playing mats to the match. But according to Gottesman, "there was a misunderstanding," and the $5 mats, which can be purchased only from Marchant Games Ltd., Loughton, England, didn't arrive in time. The quick-thinking Crimson squad worked out a rotation schedule that allowed the teams to get by using only Harvard's mats.