Snotty128 wins as the Ussr on turn 3 through victory points. All credit to @hardco he had a bumpy start, but then the deck decided to bury him in turn 2 giving him only 11 ops to play with to my 21.
In turn 1 I had a couple of high scoring coups which seemed to dissuade hardco from couping back into the middle east. He made the standard probing move into Malaysia, which I countered with decol into Thailand, Indonesia, Laos and Algeria. This gave hardco a choice of losing Thailand or losing France, and he chose to coup into Algeria to save France. This led to me scoring Asia domination from hardcos hand, and then Middle east domination from my hand, with no US presence.
Turn 2 had hardco give an excellent counter in the headline with cia giving just enough ops to france so I couldnt control it outright after de gaulle. Correctly fearing truman I stayed out of the trap in france and took the country count in Europe instead. Russia kept hardco on the rack with the Isreali and Korean war both giving more victory points.
Luckily Turn 3 saw the asia scoring card scored again for domination then victory . The europe scoring card was in my hand and didnt get played once in the entire game.
Ive picked the four leaf clover icon as hardcos bad luck in the draw is what ended this game so early.
I dont think theres anyone in the queue, maybe I could pick up a couple of challengers from the tourney thread if needed