Today is the Advisory Council General Meeting held during the Spring NABC. Because of the fast-paced nature of this meeting, we will be live updating as information comes. It is a hectic combination of important information, interesting news, but also quite a few complaints. As the 2nd District Alternate to District Director David Moss, I am here as a voting member representing our district, complete with my green voting paddle. Also in attendance from our Unit: David Moss and Uday, veterans of the Board of Governor meetings.
General Items
Financially ACBL is doing well. Year 2021 ended with a net operating income of $2.6M. The ACBL balance sheet has increased to 5x since 2019, from $2 million to $10 million.
About 1000 face to face clubs operating
Reduced the online virtual club point multiplier
membership down 7%
tournament attendance down 50% pre-pandemic
Austin was a success from a player outlook but lost money
Reno has a large block but will likely still lose money
ACBL IT is still in crisis. 90% of the department is built from scratch with new hires and outside contractors. The technology is old and onboarding the new software engineers has not been easy.
Discipline is a challenge because of increasing volume of cases. In recent years all of the cases were from online play. A member from the Advisor Council mentioned he has seen 4 different convicted cheaters at Reno. Why?
IT Crisis
Another member asked about the IT Crisis and why the ACBLScore overhaul has been in development for over 10 years. Many members of IT have turned over in the past few years representing the vast majority of the department. ACBLScore is a priority and is part of ACBL’s proprietary software that runs a wide variety of tournament, game, and club functions.
Another problem is ACBLScore has not been updated to reflect many of the masterpoint changes passed by the board years ago. For example, the Strength of Field changes were not yet implemented.
Ongoing Lawsuit
The primary pending litigation is the lawsuit between Peter Marcus and various ACBL tournament directors and the ACBL about unpaid overtime payments when directors worked more than 40 hours a week.
Currently, ACBL owes about 9 people about $11,000 (total to all 9), as well as the legal fees totaling $225,000. This was the final judgement of the district judge on February 8th 2022, however, the plaintiffs appealed the decision and the case does continue now on appeal.
Bruce from District 21 asked how much was paid to ACBL attorneys, how much was covered by insurance, and whether they met the deductible. Answers: definitely met the deductible, insurance covered first $150K of legal fees. After hitting $150K, ACBL started paying the remainder of the fees. They have paid to date $250K above and beyond the $150K. Handling the appeal will likely cost $30K.
Privacy Policy
A member asked why private information such as email, phone, address, and lifetime masterpoints should be seemingly accessible to 3rd parties who do not need access to it. The general council advised the room of the ACBL privacy policy and strict mandates on how various parties who can access the data must only use it for ACBL purposes.
Updates from Advisory Council Chair from Board of Directors Meeting
If a player who’s masterpoints and eligibility is within the official limits, such as 0-10K events, but the player has won international champions and titles, should he or she be allowed to compete in limited events? This issue has been referred to the Competitions and Conventions committee.
Should there be a table count or masterpoints reduction for robot partnerships in online club games? There was originally a proposal to lower the table count for games that had an excess of robots players. However, the issue seems far more complicated than originally planned. This issue has been referred to the masterpoints committee for further review.
NABC Websites – in the past ACBL put together a website to give details about the NABC and districts would also put up their own websites. A prior motion proposed that districts would not be allowed to build websites that competed with the ACBL NABC website. The motion was NOT passed (my personal opinion: the only reason this was an issue is because the ACBL NABC Reno website was inadequate or broken for several weeks – moving forward this likely won’t be a problem and districts should still be welcome to advertise and build functionality separate from ACBL’s site).
The Board passed procedures for replacing a regional director should he or she become unavailable. The motivation came from the unfortunate news that the Regional Director for Region 6 passed away on February 25, 2022, with no existing procedure in place.
The chair mentioned several new committee changes, including that Lee Lin has moved from the masterpoints committee to the Competition and Conventions Committee.
Motions for Reconsideration to the Board of Directors
Someone motioned that the electronic devices policy needed reconsideration. About 7 voting members of the Council voted to reconsider the electronic devices policy, with quite a few more opposed (no official tally given).
Members from the District including Providence, Rhode Island mentioned they were the developers behind provnabc.org as volunteers who spent hundreds of hours working on the site. They were particularly offended by the motion to stop local organizations from establishing their own websites.
Other Odds and Ends
Some may remember the prior discussion on coffee and danishes at these meetings. I’m happy to report there was coffee. Someone mentioned they saw no danishes, but it was not an issue for those of us who stayed at the Hyatt Place Reno, complete with free breakfast.