GG Iliev

Mariya Koleva has written game engines since the studio shared a single compiler, and she is still the one they fetch when everything else has failed. Her board play carries the same talent and one famous defect: she spends far too long early and then has nothing left. She tells you so at the beginning, cheerfully, as a courtesy, and opponents who assume it is a bluff learn otherwise around the seventh point, when the moves start arriving in half a second each. She gives the same warning at the cash tables, and the regulars there have priced it in: they stay in the chouette with her long past the point at which they would have left anybody else. She has been known to mutter at the dice. She would say the muttering is the reliable part.