A Jester Waits in the Wings 🃏

adjusts headset while gills flatten against the overcast Four mercenaries showed up to Cedar Hills for "Tensions Boil," Week 6 of 10, under a suspiciously polite 80.9°F sky and a 2.0 mph breeze that couldn't stir a leaf let alone a grudge. The premise on paper: two top contenders locked in a verbal spat while a Jester quietly lifts the win out from under them. That's a new kind of chaos for this course — the last two weeks gave us a snoring Boss Mob and a solo throne by default. This week, the Queen's indifference cracked open into actual palace intrigue, and somebody in this four-person raid party was about to cash in on it.

The Jester Grabs the Crown 👑

Cameron Collar and Jared Zimmel tied for the RAD lead after hole 3, and for a beat it looked like a proper duel. Then Collar pulled away, closed with a Clutch Finish birdie on hole 18 — sidewalk OB guarding the left, bathroom concrete guarding the right — and locked the door on Zimmel's -3 chase before it ever got loud. Chase Richards made his series debut at +1, and both Richards and Zimmel torched the front nine with Front Nine Heater surges before the back caught up with them. The real story is the leap: Collar's -6/945 towers over last week's -3/921, a +24 rating jump and a Personal Best stapled to a bogey-free back nine. The Jester didn't just steal the win — he crowned himself while everyone else was still arguing about hole 3.

The Boss Fight Blinks First

Over in RPA, Bradley Bushman ran the field solo again — wire-to-wire, bogey-free, -9 at a 982 rating, sole birdies on holes 1, 2, 8, 14, and 16. His Hot Streak Ended at three holes (6-8), the exact stretch leading into Cedar Hills' fog-gate boss fight, before that hole 8 birdie broke the silence and put the course's toughest test (Difficulty Index 7.4) in his pocket. Compare that to last week's -8/981 and you're looking at the smallest possible improvement — one stroke, one rating point — but in a division of one, steady is still the whole story.

One Hole Gives, One Hole Takes

Collar's Above Rating Performance — 905 up to a 945-rated round, a 40-point jump — sat at one end of the day's spectrum, with Chase Richards at the other: a 911 rating dropping to 858, a 53-point tumble in his debut. Hole 8 claimed nearly the entire field except for Bushman's lone birdie, while hole 15, Cedar Hills' "chill side quest" at a 3.8 Difficulty Index, gave strokes back — Zimmel banked a sole birdie there to go with another on hole 12. Collar's bogey-free -6 stood as the day's cleanest scorecard, no scrambling required.

The Pot Grows, the Ace Doesn't Show

No chains rattled for the Super Ace Pot this week — two players split a $4.00 contribution each, nudging the balance from $178.00 to $182.00 with nobody claiming it. The vault fattens, the chains stay quiet, and somewhere out there a hole is waiting to make someone very rich very suddenly.

One Tag Defended, One Tag Buried

Bushman's bogey-free -9 kept the Void Echo clipped to his bag for another week — a relic born from three successful raids and defenses in a season, its violet lightning arcing in perpetual silence when nobody's brave enough to challenge it. Official record calls it "The Void Echo Holds; The Queen's Judgment Pending," and this week the judgment stayed pending. Pool B told a rougher story: Matt Smith's Ghost Market status took the hit that AllIn mode always threatens — miss the raid, get buried at the bottom of the reshuffle. No name-brand replacement to report yet, just the cold mechanics of a mode that shows absence zero mercy.

The Tiara's Real Test Approaches

Bushman's quiet reign and Collar's freshly minted RAD coronation both point the same direction — a season simmering toward something bigger than another wire-to-wire stat line. Next week, the top-ranked Delver takes a risky shot too close to the Queen's own turf, and word from the booth is it costs a penalty stroke and a chunk of prestige. The throne's been uncontested for weeks. That's about to change.