GG Hartley

James Hartley managed a cattle station in outback Queensland, three hours from the nearest town and considerably further from anyone's opinion, and taught himself the game from a station-house set and a rulebook with four pages missing.

He reached the top tier without ever running a rollout, and he is one of the very few up there who has never let software near his game. He will talk, at a slow pace and mostly about other things, and he goes quiet the moment there is anything to decide. He reads the position, and the man across from it, on nothing but forty years of trusting his own judgement under a very large sky.