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By Neto Baptiste
Antigua and Barbuda Wadadli Warriors completed a historic four-peat as champions of World Domino after being declared joint winners of the World Council of Domino Federation (WCDF) World Domino Championships, which climaxed at the John E St Luce Finance and Conference Center here on Sunday.
The Warriors racked up a total of 13 points in the tournament, the same amount of points as rivals St Kitts & Nevis as the two were crowned joint champions of the 2025 edition of the tournament.
However, the results were not without controversy as two countries forfeited matches to St Kitts & Nevis on the final day, allowing them to move from nine points to 13 and joint leaders at the top of the standings.
President of the Antigua and Barbuda Domino Association (ABDA), Carol-Faye Bynoe, spoke to Observer media regarding the situation.
“Coming into the finals, we had some competitions running over a few days, like the female pairs and mixed pairs, and so Antigua won that competition in terms of the mixed pairs, taking us from nine points to 12 points. St Kitts lost and remained on nine points and going into the other competitions, you had two countries that forfeited their games to St Kitts. Barbados who did it first and forfeited their points to St Kitts and St Lucia did the same thing. So that brought St Kitts up to par with us and that’s where the tie came in,” she said.
Although frowned upon, there are no rules barring teams from forfeiting matches at the tournament while there are no penalties that can be applied. Bynoe said officials from the WCDF present in Antigua have vowed to review the rules and propose changes going forward.
“It is something the WCDF intends to address in the future because we’ve never had this happening before. We’ve never had two countries holding the title and we’ve never had forfeitures of this magnitude happening before. The tournament committee actually referred it to the rules and regulation book we have here but there is nothing addressing it but because of that it remained as such but it will be addressed going forward,” the president said.
Antigua and Barbuda first won the tournament in 2016 as hosts, before going on to win additional titles in 2018 and 2023.
Bynoe said hosting the tournament has been an overwhelming experience and that the players are due a well-deserved break, but that plans are being made to celebrate the milestone.
“Antigua will be doing our postmortem as usual and we will take a break and look to regroup our local competition some time in September because we have two teams travelling, with one travelling to Dominica and the other one travelling to Guyana ;so with some of our members out we would have to delay the start of the local tournament until they return. I think that after we get over all of our exhaustion, we can think about [celebration] because it has been really taxing on us,” she said.
Barbados finished third with five points.
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