posted Mar 27th, 2006 - The next round of NSL-TV has now been uploaded. Round three of the FSL Shamrock Showdown 2006 includes several interesting aspects of the competition.

The featured team is Optic Nerve with eye surgeon and Skins Game sponsor Dr. Joel Shugar, Solly Williams, Bob Byrne and Marco Arrigo from Italy. The NSL News will follow up later with a more comprehensive introduction of Optic Nerve and its never ending rivalry with Teiwaz.

At this point, it is well worth taking a closer look at the engineering by Optic Nerve for round three. The combination of Blocks 10 (Diamond - Bunyip) and 17 (Danish T - Murphy) usually forces teams to apply memory plus mirror imaged pages for the front piece, or choose memory for the rear piece.

Block 10 switches the front piece partners in their slots, while Block 17 switches slots in both pieces and mirror images the sequence, unless another block switches the slots back. This was the case in round three and brought the front piece partners back to their original slots at the end of the sequence, while the rear piece partners ended up in switched positions.

All other teams accepted the memory for the rear piece, and Optic Nerve found a very unique way to get the rear piece back in the original order. Solly Williams, the "hopper" of Block 17, simply hopped back into his center inside position after the first vertical transition of Block 17.

In other words: Optic Nerve turned the free transition from the Murphy to the Bow (H) into another vertical transition and was very successful with this extraordinary maneuver. Optic tied archrival Teiwaz Lake Wales with a 14-pointer, and both teams beat the Austrian Monkey Circus in this round.

Round three was also one of the best rounds for Norway Arcteryx. In fact, it was a very special round for the Norwegian team since it outscored the overall winner, Sinapsi PD, by one point. Team Fastrax had another technically very clean round and still ended up with only 17 points on the scoreboard due to non-judgeable maneuvers on the hill, which resulted in the loss of two points.

The next round will be uploaded tomorrow, stay tuned.