Today kicked off the national finals of the Grand National Teams. ACBL Executive Director Bronia Jenkins took the New York City and Long Island team photo below.
This year ACBL made a much appreciated improvement — the first day qualifying Swiss uses pre-duplicated boards with hand records, as well as BridgeMates for scoring. There is also a live scoreboard adding to the suspense for any spectators, but decreasing the suspense because you no longer need to do the comparing scores ritual (“push”, “lose 8”, “win 1”).
Everyone in the room is playing the same boards more of less at the same time, so even the Flight B and C players can ask their championship players how they handled each hand during the water cooler or bar post mortems.
Here are the hand records from the first 4 rounds. Also ACBL Live results
This year, representing Unit 155’s Greater New York Bridge Association and Unit 242’s Nassau Suffolk Bridge Association at the Philadelphia North American Bridge Championships:
Championship Flight
Gillian Miniter
Joe Grue
John Hurd (not pictured)
Joel Wooldridge (not pictured)
Iulian Rotaru
Flight A
Joseph Byrnes
Monique France
Dina Schechter
Charles Bilich
Michael Krevor
Flight B1
Andrew Jeanguenat
Matthew Gordon
Jack Latta
Maya Jonas-Silver
Lee Lin
Alan Davidson
Flight B2
Vladimir Kolbun
Amit Duvshani
William Sigward
Nancy Marshall
Flight C1
Music Li
Yuchen Xu
Hengrui Xing
Yang Xu
Flight C2
Sam Bellows
Ellie Gossage
Michael Zhao
Cooper Pierce
Unfortunately, Norman Trabulus was unable to attend the national finals, despite captaining both the winning Flight A and Flight B teams in Distrct 24 this year.