We will be holding all of the opening rounds at 110 East 55th Street, 6th floor, at 11am.
Feb 2nd: Flight A and Flight C
Feb 15th: Championship Flight
Feb 23rd: Flight B
Here is the GNT Flyer for 2025.
Here are the full conditions of contest for GNT 2025.
Click to pre-register your GNT 2025 team
See Teams Already Registered
| GNT Championship Flight Opening Round: Sat, Feb 15 Day 2: Sun, Feb 16 |
| Seed 1 vs Seed 4 match (Feb 16th, 11am) Allen Kahn, Jeffrey Rothstein, John Rengstorff, Glenn Eisenstein vs Sam Ehrlichman, Jacob Freeman, Franco Baseggio, Cornelius Duffie, Sheldon Tan, Adam Wildavsky Seed 2 vs Seed 3 match (Feb 16th, 11am) Mike Lipkin, David Gurvich, Erez Hendelman, Russ Samuel vs Gillian Miniter, Joe Grue, John Hurd, Joel Wooldridge, Max Rotaru Knocked Out Julian Kurtzman, Dan Lev, Sam Kuang, David Yoon Kari Tetzlaff, Rachael Moller, Laura Tolkow, Stephannie Culbertson |
District 24 Champ GNT RR Session February 15, 2025
Scores after 5 rounds
Team Wins Score
1 4.00 62.77 Q Allen Kahn – Jeffrey Rothstein – Glenn Eisenstein – John Rengstorff
2 4.00 61.85 Q Michael Lipkin – David Gurvich – Erez Hendelman – Russell Samuel
3 3.00 57.97 Q Gillian Miniter – Joe Grue – John Hurd – Joel Wooldridge – Iulian Rotaru
4 2.00 51.05 Q Samuel Ehrlichman – Jacob Freeman – Franco Baseggio – Cornelius Duffie – Sheldon Tan – Adam Wildavsky
5. 52.00 42.61 Julian Kurtzman – Daniel Lev – Samuel Kuang – David Yoon
6. 0.00 23.75 Kari Tetzlaff – Rachael Moller – Laura Tolkow – Stephannie Culbertson
GNT-A and GNT-C kicked off last week and the semifinal KOs are in progress. The first match took place last night. Congrats to Janice Winwder, Stephanie Chamberlain, Thomas Romeo, and Thierry Bonnet for placing 3rd/4th in the District. Each player will receive overall awards of at least 7 Masterpoints, half red half gold. Team Bellows has advanced to the finals and will play the winner of the other semifinal match, with teams captained by Music Li and Rachel Brannan.
See the rest of the matchup on our GNT season page.
You can still register a team for the Championship Flight and Flight B. We have 16 teams registered across the two events, but would love to welcome more. As it turns out, any new teams that sign up for the Championship Flight will drastically change the event structure. Because we take our GNTs quite seriously, when there are exactly 8 teams, our seeding committee will form a bracket of 8 teams and the teams play a knock out starting in the first round. However, with 9 teams, we can do a full round robin with 8 rounds of 6 boards. Once you add the 10th team, rather than have 9 rounds, it is more common for the seeding committee again to split the teams into two group of 5 to play a round robin (and the top two teams of each group moves on to semi finals).
Thankfully, we are prepared to accommodate any number of teams and absorb the oncoming chaos. As for Flight B, we will run a swiss regardless of the number of teams. We simply don’t feel that seeding Flight B is viable and the randomness of a Swiss is more acceptable than the randomness of imperfect seeding.
The team of Julian Kurtzman, Jess Jurkovic, Dan Lev, and Sam Kuang took the top seed position in Flight A, ending the day with 86.50 Victory Points after winning 4 of 7 rounds, beating 2nd and 3rd place teams Team Yoon and Team Jeanguenat who each won 5 matches. Defending champions Team Trabulus also made the final 4. See the brackets at gnyba.org/gnt#teams
In Flight C, the team of Music Li, Yuchen Xu, Hengrui Xing, and Yang Xu took first place with a commanding 113.40 Victory Points, beating 2nd place Team Bellows by over 20 VPs. GNT veterans Team Windwer took 3rd followed by Team Brannan in 4th (the qualification today pushed member Kerry Noble over the Life Master line!). Congratulations also to many first time GNT-C players. We hope to see you in more Unit and District events!
For completion, the GNT-A Final Whiteboard
Good news, we have a working list of teams who are pre-registered for GNTs. We could use a few more, in particular in Flight C which allows us to send 2 teams to the Philadelphia NABCs as long as we have 8 teams in the opening round swiss.
If you have a team to register, which you may edit at any time, please register asap. In addition to assisting the organizers and director, one major advantage of pre-registering is voting on your favorite pizza topping. Currently mushroom pizza* is in the lead…
We do have defending champions in most flights, other than Flight C. Team Lipkin is back to defend their Championship Flight victory with 75% of the same team composition. Team Poon has the identical team from last year, where they qualified into the Round of 8 in 6th place and proceeded to win 3 KOs to win the District GNT-B, earning 33.5 gold points, a trip to Toronto nationals, and the hardest-earned possible invitation to the Blue Ribbon Pairs.
Flight A currently has the 2023 season champions registered, with Team Trabulus easily the most consistently winning grassroots team across the past 8 years. Combined their team has represented the New York City and Long Island almost every year, sometimes multiple times a year, in the North American Pairs and Grand National Teams.
Flight C technically does not qualify as defending champions under the conditions, but the prior winners from the NAP-C nationals and GNT-C nationals merged on to a combined team. Still, we should also point out that Flight C is the most accessible event of the year for newer players, and last year our finalists had never scored IMPs prior to the event. All players are not Life Masters and have 0-750 Masterpoints.
*If you registered prior to the pizza topping vote, you may edit your response and we will re-tally, or just let us know via email
Thanks to everyone who attended the GNYBA Winter Regional.
Here is a quick link to the official regional results.
Up next, we have three great events.
The District 24 GNTs for 2025 (four different flights)
The Silver Points Pro-Am in March 2025
The Eastern States Regional in May 2025
| Rank | MPs | Player |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 79.57 | Zachary Grossack – Newton, MA |
| 2 | 65.72 | Martin Schaltz – Copenhagen, Copenhagen |
| 3 | 65.72 | Chris Willenken – New York, NY |
| 4 | 62.59 | Susan Schnelwar – New York, NY |
| 5 | 61.88 | Glenn Robbins – New York, NY |
| 6 | 61.88 | Jiang Gu – Mountain Lakes, NJ |
| 7 | 44.57 | Matthew Weingarten – Seattle, WA |
| 8 | 44.57 | Sam Goldberg – Melville, NY |
| 9 | 44.26 | David Soukup – Philadelphia, PA |
| 10 | 43.33 | Michael Lipkin – Brooklyn, NY |
| 11 | 40.39 | Samuel Ehrlichman – Brooklyn, NY |
| 12 | 40.39 | Kari Tetzlaff – Brooklyn, NY |
| 13 | 40.18 | Joe Grue – New York, NY |
| 14 | 38.92 | Gillian Miniter – New York, NY |
| 15 | 37.67 | Adam Wildavsky – New York, NY |
| 16 | 34.21 | Jacqueline Chang – New York, NY |
| 17 | 33.51 | Migry Zur Campanile – New York, NY |
| 18 | 32.36 | Jerry Goldberg – New York, NY |
| 19 | 32.20 | Harry Faivus – New York, NY |
| 20 | 30.99 | Julian Kurtzman – Brooklyn, NY |
| 21 | 30.90 | Sergio Bianchi – Cesena, Cesena |
| 22 | 30.86 | Eleanor Seaman – New York, NY |
| 23 | 29.77 | Janos Geller – Morristown, NJ |
| 24 | 29.77 | Jeffrey Rothstein – New York, NY |
| 25 | 29.70 | Uday Ivatury – New York City, NY |
| 26 | 28.57 | J David Adler – New York, NY |
| 27 | 28.57 | Leonardo Fruscoloni – Brooklyn, NY |
| 28 | 28.57 | Aldo Gerli – Padova, Padova |
| 29 | 28.44 | Mustafa Cem Tokay – New York, NY |
| 30 | 28.44 | Barbara Hendra – Brooklyn, NY |
| 31 | 28.09 | David Parsons – New York, NY |
| 32 | 26.34 | David Yoon – Bayside, NY |
| 33 | 26.06 | Lynne Koeppel – New York, NY |
| 34 | 25.75 | Iulian Rotaru – New York, NY |
| 35 | 25.70 | Monique France – New York, NY |
| 36 | 25.55 | Jerry Stamatov – Boca Raton, FL |
| 37 | 25.55 | Gail Schargel – New York, NY |
| 38 | 23.94 | Federico Iavicoli – Roma 00185, Roma 00185 |
| 39 | 23.94 | Leonardo Cima – Roma, Roma |
| 40 | 22.75 | Dana Berkowitz – New York, NY |
| 41 | 22.75 | Franco Baseggio – New York, NY |
| 42 | 22.39 | David Marker – New York, NY |
| 43 | 22.03 | Andrew Rosenthal – New York, NY |
| 44 | 21.51 | Daniel Rothstein – New York, NY |
| 45 | 21.50 | Ettore Bianchi – Stamford, CT |
| 46 | 21.50 | Barbara Dessi – , |
| 47 | 21.33 | Ron Gerard – White Plains, NY |
| 48 | 20.66 | Ralph Tamlyn – New York City, NY |
| 49 | 20.59 | Hong Ding – New York, NY |
| 50 | 20.59 | Sheldon Tan – New York, NY |
| Rank | MPs | Player |
|---|---|---|
| 51 | 19.20 | Jill Marshall – Port Chester, NY |
| 52 | 19.16 | Adam Grossack – Newton, MA |
| 53 | 19.09 | Joseph Byrnes – Long Beach, NY |
| 54 | 18.76 | William Powell – New York, NY |
| 55 | 18.74 | Melissa Fawer – New York, NY |
| 56 | 18.64 | Lee Lin – New York City, NY |
| 57 | 18.38 | Christal Henner – New York, NY |
| 58 | 17.89 | Alan Davidson – New York, NY |
| 59 | 17.06 | Parag Saxena – Rye, NY |
| 60 | 16.34 | Allen Kahn – New York, NY |
| 61 | 16.10 | David Sloane – Glen Cove, NY |
| 62 | 15.77 | Giorgia Botta – Brooklyn, NY |
| 63 | 15.71 | Jeffrey Allen – Armonk, NY |
| 64 | 15.71 | Theo Allen – Armonk, NY |
| 65 | 15.67 | Wendy Nickerson – New York, NY |
| 66 | 14.70 | Melanie Petsch – New York, NY |
| 67 | 14.64 | Sarik Goyal – Jersey City, NJ |
| 68 | 14.64 | Kelley Hwang – New York, NY |
| 69 | 14.37 | Manish Chopra – New York, NY |
| 70 | 14.37 | William Rittenhouse – Round Top, NY |
| 71 | 14.12 | Gloria Tamlyn – New York City, NY |
| 72 | 13.89 | Ilan Wolff – New York City, NY |
| 73 | 13.76 | Charles Bilich – Hewlett, NY |
| 74 | 13.74 | Jason Ji – JERSEY CITY, NJ |
| 75 | 13.54 | Stanley Tuhrim – New York, NY |
| 76 | 13.54 | Betty Mintz – New York, NY |
| 77 | 13.41 | William Hohauser – Port Washington, NY |
| 78 | 13.41 | Jeffrey Neuman – New York, NY |
| 79 | 13.23 | Thomas Hunter – Norwalk, CT |
| 80 | 13.23 | Valerie Deneroff – New York, NY |
| 81 | 13.23 | Martin Deneroff – New York, NY |
| 82 | 12.90 | Paul Frean – New York, NY |
| 83 | 12.77 | Peter Clark – New York, NY |
| 84 | 12.65 | Michael Krevor – Port Washington, NY |
| 85 | 12.46 | Barbara Schwartz – New York City, NY |
| 86 | 12.11 | Victor Poon – Stony Brook, NY |
| 87 | 12.09 | Paul Lewis – White Plains, NY |
| 88 | 11.98 | Joyce Goldstein – Brooklyn, NY |
| 89 | 11.88 | Rona Levine – New York, NY |
| 90 | 11.88 | Stephen Levine – New York, NY |
| 91 | 11.73 | Elliot Sternlicht – New York, NY |
| 92 | 11.71 | Scott McDermott – New York, NY |
| 93 | 11.70 | Sheng Li – New York, NY |
| 94 | 11.64 | Igor Savchenko – Morris Plains, NJ |
| 95 | 11.32 | Elizabeth Reich – New York, NY |
| 96 | 11.21 | Alex Perlin – Metuchen, NJ |
| 97 | 10.62 | James Sundstrom – New York City, NY |
| 98 | 10.62 | Zhuo Wang – Forest Hills, NY |
| 99 | 10.48 | Robert Kuhnreich – New York, NY |
| 100 | 10.24 | David Gurvich – New York, NY |
You can now register your team with the simple Google form:
Register your D24 GNT Team 2025
You can change or edit your submission at any time, just email gnt@gnyba.org
You are very welcome to register teams for multiple flights, and your team can have drastically different rosters between different flights. For whatever reason, last year many Flight A and Flight B teams, without any intended coordination, happened to do some musical chairs shuffling so that teammates and even partnerships were not the same. It was lots of fun!
Note, the latest conditions and flyer will always be linked off the home page of gnyba.org on the right hand side, or on the D24 GNT page, so be sure you are using the latest.
We just have a few photos courtesy of David Moss from very successful first day of the December 2024 Holiday Regional. We far exceeded the original attendance projections and thankfully secured the additional playing space months prior to accommodate significantly more attendance.
Thank you to our tournament chairs, Phil Lentz and Bill Sigward, along with unit president Melanie Petsch and many others for their hard work (a slew of other volunteers man the hospitality desk, partnership desk, and behind the scenes organizing to make it happen).
Apparently it is now confirmed, Jiang Gu has indeed broken the Barry Crane Top 500 record set by Joe Grue in 2018. We will know the final tally at the end of the 4th day of the regional (and perhaps he will grind out a few more online black points too on New Year’s Eve).
Many players know about the bracketed Ace of Clubs, Ace of Virtual Clubs, and Mini-McKenney races. Every year, 15 players in each Unit and each District win their bracketed “Mini-McKenney” award, starting low with the 0-5 bracket, 5-20 bracket, 20-50, etc. based on how many points you have in the beginning of the year.
Has anyone ever stopped to think, if this is the Mini-McKenney, then what is the McKenney (the non-mini version)?
The main race for number of total Masterpoints won in a calendar year used to be called, “The McKenney” race, later renamed the Barry Crane Top 500 Race.
Anyway, GNYBA member Joe Grue is the current record holder for the Barry Crane Top 500, breaking the record in 2018 with a staggering 3676.40 points (for comparison, the 2017 winner Chris Compton scored 2746.50 points and the 2019 winner Mark Itabashi scored 2607.46 points). As with all McKenney style races, the total includes all pigmented points, from platinum down to black, including online black from virtual club games, but the total does NOT include the colorless online points from non-virtual club events*.
Jiang Gu is a local New Jersey expert who as of November 2024 earned 3426.84 points YTD! That excludes his strong showings in the recent Vegas NABC plus the Palm Springs and Boca Raton regionals. Either way, there is a very good chance he will exceed the 250 points required to break Joe Grue’s 2018 record and set the new annual high water mark. And it all comes down to the GNYBA Regional held in Times Square this December 26 to December 29, where Jiang will play with partner Glenn Robbins in the daily Open Pairs.
Stop by any day during the Regional to root them on. Whether you win or lose against them, or avoid them entirely by playing in the Gold Rush or Brackted Teams, you can witness history in the making next week.
Don’t be too sad for the prior record holder. Joe Grue has made bridge history plenty of times beyond the Barry Crane Top 500. The two of them caught up on friendly terms during the Vegas NABC.
—-
*For the purists, yes, the total also includes the online gold and red from the Online Individual NABC, online gold from the NAOBC, and online pigments on special silver linings and stardust weeks, most of which did not exist in 2018. However, the sum of all of the online events are small compared to the awards received at old fashioned face-to-face tournaments.
The Annual Membership Meeting of the Greater New York Bridge Association (GNYBA) will be held in person at 2:50 pm at the regional tournament at the Times Square Marriott on Saturday, December 28th.
The GNYBA Nominating Committee has nominated the following new candidates for a one-year term on the Board:
Yasmine Guenancia
David Moss
Our bylaws allow additional candidates to be added by petition. If you would like to be added as a candidate for the 2024 Board, you can nominate yourself and provide a petition with 50 signatures supporting your candidacy. Once received, your name will be added to the roster of new candidates. Please reply to: Alan Davidson (alan.davidson@gmail.com) by December 15th.
In the absence of petition candidates, these new candidates will join the following continuing (completing a 2-year term) and returning (starting a new 2-year term) Directors to comprise the GNYBA Board for 2024, beginning January 1, 2025.
The annual meeting will also approve the slate of officers and directors nominated by the board, which is as follows:
President: Melanie Petsch
Vice President: Lee Lin
Vice President & Secretary: Alan Davidson
Treasurer: Jeffrey Rothstein
Tournament Co-chair: Philip Lentz
Tournament Co-chair: William Sigward
Jeff Bayone (***)
Stephanie Culbertson (***)
Alan Davidson (***)
Yasmine Guenancia (*)
Maya Jonas-Silver (**)
Phil Lentz (***)
Stephen Levine (***)
Lee Lin (***)
Richard Marchione (***)
Rachael Moller (***)
David Moss (*)
Adam Parrish (***)
Melanie Petsch (***)
Amy Rhodes (***)
Tom Romeo (**)
Jeffrey Rothstein (***)
William Sigward (***)
Deborah Tormey (***)
Norman Trabulus (***)
Barbara Ullman (***)
Gail Wallach (***)
Mee Warren (***)
Abigail Weinshank (***)
(*) Beginning a new 1-year Term
(**) Completing a 2-year Term
(***) Beginning a new 2-year Term
