Chance To Become Life Master In Just One Day!

Most players have no trouble reaching 500 masterpoints required for Life Master. The bottleneck is the specific pigment requirements. In particular, many struggle to obtain 50 gold point, having long won plenty of the other colors.

The ongoing Save Your Regional event on BBO is your chance to become a Life Master in just one day, even if you have NEVER won a single gold point in your life. You can satisfy all 50 gold points by winning a two-session open pairs game, as long as there are over 321 tables. Remember, you need 500 total points, 100 gold/red/plat, 75 silver, 75 black, and 50 gold/plat.

Regionals Pay More Points, No Cap

Most of the Support Your Club events have had a hard cap at 6 black points per session, no matter how many tables joined. However, the regional is using the ACBL General Formula for computing the masterpoint award.

For a regionally rated, two-session pairs event (not during NABC), the prize for overall 1st place is very linear up to 60 tables. With 6 tables, 1st place pays 7 gold points. Each additional table adds 0.4375 to the prize, until you reach 30.63 at 60 tables. A Gold Rush pairs event has a 0.525 multiplier effect, but otherwise is the same formula.

However, starting at 61 tables, first prize is 31.06, and only increases logarithmically. That is, each incremental table is adding increasingly less to the prize. ACBL would award more total masterpoints splitting one 300 table event into 5 staggered, separate events of 60 tables.

But for now, we are seeing huge 300+ table counts, and so the winning pair of yesterday’s open game won 49.85 gold points, with 317 tables. For whatever reason, the regional results are listed under Horn Lake, MS. Today’s Gold Rush paid 27.41 gold.

Consolation Game Penalty For Open Game?!?

However, for Friday May 1st, ACBL did a VERY strange thing. They had 299er games, and a concurrent Gold Rush, all normal. But there was no concurrent two-session open game!!

Why not? Maybe someone didn’t want open to pay too much! When you have concurrent 299er and gold rush events alongside an open game, the open game prize pool includes all tables from the limited games in computing the prize.

The open game would have paid a prize of 61.13 for having the equivalent of 853 tables.

Instead, they made the open game a “side game series”, each one session. The winners of the Evening Side Series received a prize equal to 195 tables — and even more strange, it was considered a Consolation Event paying only 65% of the usual amount – 19.20 for one session.

I understand we want to be careful as we venture into the world of awarding lots of online points – but I’ve never seen a regional that pays more to the gold rush than to the open pairs. It is supposed to be a mathematical impossibility.

Saturday and Sunday Formats More Normal

Looking again at the regional schedule, it seems Saturday and Sunday have a more reasonable format. Two-session gold rush pairs, concurrent with two-session open pairs. There are also single-session side games that likely have the consolation game penalty, paying only 65% of the usual amount. We will see then whether the open game inherits the 400 gold rush tables to pay out 60+ gold points in one day – almost certainly a record for a non-NABC regional.