Otago fought to the end before settling for third place at the New Zealand interprovincial championships in Wellington at the weekend.
They finished with 91.5 points and 313.5 ends from three days of intense competition at the Akau Tangi Sports Centre.
Matthew Foster was the leading Otago performer with nine wins and 68 ends, and Daniel French, Keri Te Tamaki and Daniel Sinclair each had 8.5 wins.
Such was the closeness of the division 1 competition that the gap between second-placed Hutt Valley and fifth-placed Southland was just 6.5 points, and there were 24 draws across the tournament.
Defending champions Waikato retained the Welch Trophy with a commanding 121 points.
Otago were second last year but made a very slow start to this tournament with just three wins and two draws for a score of 9.5 out of a possible 36 after the opening round.
Dead last and needing to buck up their act, they were further up against it when the last Friday round was pushed a day, meaning the bowlers had to play 10 games between 8am and 10.30pm on Saturday.
Otago bowlers got the message and reeled off round scores of 24.5, 12.5, 21 and 24 to challenge for second place.
They dipped a little in the final round but did enough to stay third, just 2.5 points clear of Auckland and Southland, who tied for fourth on 89 points.
The bad news for Southland was that they were relegated to division 2 on countback with just seven fewer ends than Auckland.
Ashburton, a distant sixth on 54 points, were also relegated.
Tauranga and Upper Hutt will be joining division 1 next year.
Central Otago finished bottom of the division 3 competition and will drop back to division 4.
They made a slow start with just seven wins and a draw from their opening 42 games but were highly competitive the rest of the way.
South Otago reached the division 4 (south) playoff, where they were beaten 24-12 by South Canterbury.
