Catching up on the league

First, a bit of background to cover the last couple of weeks:

The match I played after my last post was a bit of a downer.  I never really got going, and my opponent thrashed me pretty badly.  He was nice about it, though he was listening to music on his iPod for the length of the entire match.  I suppose that is allowed, though it seemed a bit anti-social to me.

My next scheduled match after that was against a player who has one of the highest per-inning averages in the division (and therefore the highest handicap), but has yet to win a match in the second half of the league schedule.

Side note:  I only recently learned how the standings and playoffs and such work.  For each half of the schedule, the top three players make the playoffs and play each other to determine the top six places, which all pay out.  I was well out of the running for the first half, but I have an outside chance of placing in the top three for the second half.  More on that later.

To my surprise, this next opponent called me and offered to forfeit the match.  Apparently he was very frustrated with his results in the league, and just did not want to play any more.  I discussed the issue with Frank, the man running the league, and he decided that if I needed my final match in order to decide if I would make the playoffs or not, he would pair me with someone else.  The player that wanted to forfeit would not play again in the league.  This was okay with me - it would feel weird to be playing someone with something on the line (for me at least) while knowing that my opponent really did not want to play.

Which leads us to yesterday.  The final match (maybe not for me, if I need to make up last week's match) is played against the player who is closest in handicap to you.  In my case, this meant that I was getting a rematch against the player I lost to in the first week of the league.  It would be a good test of whether I had improved.  It would also be a test of whether I could incorporate all of the theory I have been reading about the fundamentals of my game and how to improve them.