The game that Jennifer started.

I am pretty sure that anyone that reads my occassional blog postings is also a reader of Jennifer Buxton's awesome blog. And if you're not, you should be. Not only is Jennifer's blog interesting, informative and full of great photos but she also posts nearly every day. I was talking to Jenn today about her blog and said I might be able to come up with something for her as a guest blogger post. That woman works hard and we need to give her a break! So I was thinking about it and thought that writing a post about how I have done well in the show ring because of blogs she has written would be nice. Specifically I want to talk about the two barrels and a pole game that Jennifer first told us about here. What a great game idea! Interesting, original and not hard to set up. All my favorite things all in one package. So I had to try it. I looked back through photos and I think this may have been the first attempt. It would have been at the Quabbin Valley Performance Open last April. The horse is Cloud Dancing and he was my super horse for an entire season. He didn't let me down with the first time out with the Two barrels game. Note the documentation which comes directly from Jennifer's blog.The judge was impressed.

Next I showed the two Barrels and a pole game at Factory Ponies Live in June of 2011. The judge wasn't NAN card impressed but pretty close. The horse is Johnny Cash. He has since retired from showing.

 

Next I took some photo show shots of the Two Barrels and a pole game. It's not as fun without Jennifer's documentation but I still used it for Feature Presentaion in the MEPSA OF performance division...

 ...and with Caramel Latte in the MEPSA AR/CM performance division. I think I cropped these photos a bit more before I sent them in.

Anyway, back to live showing. This is Flash in the Sky. She is showing at the New England Performance Challenge in October of 2011. The judge was again impressed. Flash doesn't look very interested in the game though.

After that Cloud Dancing showed again at the 2011 Region X regionals. This was the regular part of the show and as you can see he did very well.

Then they got reserve champ in the games stakes class. Unfortuneatly Cloud Dancing developed cracks all over his body and he had to be suddenly retired.

Then I took a pretty long break from showing and did a lot of judging. But I did go out to More Fun Live; Performance on the Porch (held on my friend Kate Cabot's porch) and Caramel Latte again showed off the Two Barrels and a Pole game. Kate was judging and apparently she hadn't seen the setup before. She was impressed.

So with just a little bit of photo hunting I found 8 times I have used this great game. I think it's nearly always the super cool documentation that carries it to a win. No matter what it is I have Jennifer to thank for starting me on this game.

 

P.S. I looked again and found another photo of this game. This one was from NEPC 2012. So I guess that makes 9 times used with very little effort to find the photos :)