A big thanks to the more than 400 of you who joined us Wednesday for one of our favorite annual events, the TechFlash Summer BBQ and Ping-Pong Tournament, at the Showbox Sodo. The action on the tabletops was top-notch, the crowd was great, and we had fun catching up with people from across the Seattle tech community.

And who knew someone would come dressed up as a tree?

Team Banyan Branch, Spirit Award winners at the TechFlash BBQ and Ping-Pong Tourney. (Photo by Marcus Donner.)

That was the team from social media agency Banyan Branch (pictured at right), which took home the coveted Spirit Award thanks to their unique display of corporate pride -- coming out ahead of the stylish homemade getups worn by Blue Box Group and the, um, eye-catching matching pants sported by the team from online real estate firm Findwell (pictured below).

But the big winner of the night was a familiar name, ping-pong wizard Valeri Kim, representing tech consulting company Akvelon, who successfully defended his TechFlash title to take home the championship in the expert bracket. He overcame Minh Le of Silicon Valley Bank in a rematch of last year's final.

Valeri Kim, representing Akvelon, successfully defended his TechFlash title with a championship in the expert ping-pong division. (Marcus Donner photo)

Despite the loss in the final, Le's second-place finish earned him one of the best prizes of the night -- three hours of free lessons at the Washington Table Tennis Center in Bellevue, which brought some masters of the sport to the event to entertain the crowd with an incredible exhibition on a side table (starting at the 1:50 mark in the video above).

Meanwhile, in the intermediate bracket, Jianmin Liu of Conenza won one of the most hard-fought and closest matches of the night against Pedro Silva of Microsoft Bing, barely edging him out, two games to one. With more than 70 people competing in the intermediate bracket this year, a victory there was no small feat.

Now in its second year, this TechFlash event is becoming something of a West Coast destination, attracting people from as far as Silicon Valley and Portland to take part in the tournaments. Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.com, for one, had a very respectable run in the intermediate ping-pong competition.

Nate DiNiro, (l) Jeff Hardison and some of the Portland startup shirts they wore during the TechFlash foosball tournament.

And Portland was well-represented, literally, by Jeff Hardison of McClenahan Bruer and Nate DiNiro of UncleNate.com, who came up to compete in foosball. They arranged in advance to get shirts from a variety of tech startups in the Portland area, then donned different shirts for each game. The idea was to show how seriously Portland takes its geeky sports, while give their hometown companies some northern exposure.

"We heard you were having a ping-pong tournament, and then we saw you had foosball, and we said, we can do that. We'll go up there, and we'll represent. We'll try to at least take second place," Hardison explained.

That's exactly what they did, as runners up in the inaugural TechFlash foosball tournament. First place went to the team of Blake Lucchesi of (This By Them and ChapterBoard) and Evan Jacobs of Motivation Mix.

The team from Findwell, whose matching getups won honorable mention in the running for the Spirit Award.

Prizes for top finishers in the tournaments included an Amazon Kindle (won by Kim) and Xbox 360 (won by Liu), both donated by sponsor BDO; Sony Bloggie Mobile HD Snap Cameras from sponsor KeyBank; a Switch iPad Satchel and ProStyle II-XF Shoulder Case from Brenthaven; gift certificates to the Spitfire bar and grill. And sponsor Blue Box Group gave away a year of free hosting to one lucky winner.

Here's a great overview of the event from Paul Kiely at Weber Shandwick, including some fun shots of the Washington Table Tennis pros.

Thanks to our sponsors for their ongoing support: 7 Simple Machines, Barokas PR, BDO, Bing, Blue Box Group, Filter, KeyBank, R2integrated, and The Washington Technology Industry Association.

We'd also like to thank our "Friends of TechFlash" for supporting this event: AdHost Data Centers, Corum Software Mergers & Acquisitions, Debra Seifert Communications, Denali Advanced Integration, DigitalScirocco, Evergreen Venture Capital Association, Extended Results, Is That Odd, JobMonkey, Marchex, MicrosoftChannel 9, OTB Solutions, Parker Smith & Feek, and Parker Technical Solutions.

And thanks again to everyone who attended -- as always, we appreciate all of your support and participation in the TechFlash community. Also see this gallery of photos from the event.

UPDATE: Here are more snapshots from the Bing photo booth where some good old-fashioned craziness took place, including Valeri Kim in a straw hat and the folks from Banyan Branch in their tree costumes.

UPDATE II: And here's a fun segment that aired on Q13 in Seattle last night, including an interview with Minh Le of Silicon Valley Bank.