GNYBA Winter League January 2021

Welcome to the January 2021 Edition of the GNYBA League! For the GNYBA leaderboard current season, use the link on the right-hand side of the GNYBA page.

2/3/2021 Update:

Check out the Round 4 hand analysis from our local bridge professional, David Gurvich!

Also, reminder that Round 5 is on SATURDAY, 7pm ET. This has been part of the original schedule, but we wanted to send the reminder because every other round so far has been Sunday night.

Lastly, the top 4 teams in each bracket will qualify into semifinal KOs, held Feb 13th, with the winners advancing to the finals on Feb 21st.

1/18/2021 Update:

Your convention card will NOT automatically load when you join the game, even if it normally does for most ACBL pair games. We have included instructions for setting your card once you and your partner have joined the table.

Download convention card publishing instructions pdf with screenshots.

1/11/2021 Update:

Results from round 1 posted!

Also, we will post instructions for now to set your convention card in future matches. The way our tournament is set up, BBO will not automatically find your partner’s convention card.

Fastest Players Shoutout Round 1: Gellas vs. Stanton

The fastest players shoutout goes to the match between Bonnie Gellas, Nancy A Garvey, Laura Tolkow, Eva Graczyk, and Gloria K Tamlyn vs. Kitty B Stanton, Sam Guzzardo, Martin M Deneroff , and Valerie L Deneroff.

1/9/2021 Update:

The leaderboard and brackets are up! First round assignments arranged by random draw and all team captains should have received their team passwords to submit lineups.

Keeping with our tradition of random shout outs, the fastest team to figure out the Lineup Submission process is team Connors, consisting of Jess Jurkovic, Lorraine Cable, Randi Adelman, and Ryan Connors. Something tells me this season they may also be strong contenders for the fastest players shoutout…

1/8/2021 Update:

We have 26 teams registered! This will be another exciting season, with many world class pros joining the field, along with our everyday 0-750 crowd. Don’t worry, we have 3 brackets to keep everyone having fun. Also, the players are still almost entirely New Yorkers and friends, so there is a great chance you will recognize many of your opponents throughout the season.

We will be sending instructions and conditions in the next 24 hours, with the first round beginning this weekend. For now, here is a sampling of the teams, roughly in order of when they registered.

David Moss, Andrew Rosenthal, Katherine M Todd, David Gurvich, Jacob Freeman, and Finn Kolesnik
Kitty B Stanton, Samuel C Guzzardo, Martin M Deneroff, and Valerie L Deneroff
Jordan Lampe, Christopher Moh, Ralph Buchalter, and Jeff Roman
Barbara Ullman, Betsy Scherl, Nancy Calomiris, Catherine Williams, Audrey J Meredith, and Cynnie Ogden
Barbara B D’Elia, Robert J Guerrera, Margot A Wagner, and Benjamin Weisgal
Kari Tetzlaff, Sam Ehrlichman, Warren Chang, and Stephen C Jansen
Laura J Schisgall, Stanley Ster, Stanley Tuhrim, and Betty J Mintz
Stephannie Culbertson, Rachael Moller, Matt Rudary, and Allison Rudary
Migry Zur Campanile, Nancy Katz, Margie J Cole, and Alejandro Bianchedi
Susan Davison, Robin Miller, Bill Sigward, Ann Murray, Celia P Verrier, and Carole J Pasquarelli
Bill M Dinner, Mark A Leibowitz, Bart Cirker, Dina E Schechter, David G Joseph, and Jack A Lipson
Philip Lentz, Jeffrey Rothstein, Thomas G Rozinski, and Grigoriy Blekherman
Ryan Connors, Randi Adelman, Jess Jurkovic, and Lorraine Cable
Bonnie Gellas, Nancy A Garvey, Laura Tolkow, Eva J Graczyk, and Gloria K Tamlyn
Ralph Tamlyn, Robert Tamlyn, Steve Levine, Rona Levine, Joyce M Goldstein, and Tracy A Brines
Lynne Koeppel, Mustafa Cem Tokay, Okay Gur, and Gokhan M Yilmaz
Leonardo Cima, Ettore Bianchi, Alessandro Gandoglia, and Giacomo Percario
Brian Glubok, Alex Kolesnik, Walter M Schenker, Edward Zuckerberg, Ron Smith, and Tod Moses
Eric A Hendrickson, Paul G Gutterman, Andrew Caranicas, Richard D Lawson, Robert Schachter, and Mark I Krusemeyer
Sandrea Friedman, Michael J Rosen, Alene Friedman, and Andrea Hayman
Scott Mcdermott, Alan P Davidson, Lee C Lin, Adam F Siegel, and Aaron Liebhaber
Lauren Wagner, Robert A Meyers, Patricia Zebrowski, and Roland Wolfram
Lore Monnig, Joann P Goodspeed, Barbara Z Schwartz, and Monique France
Sharon Phillips, Fern M Lindsay, Cathy Dann, Kathy Markby, and Nell W Otto
Claire Alpert, Janice Molson, Alfredo Versace, and Francisco Bernal
Bill Cook, Robert Todd, Anita Heitler, Don Heitler, Tom Bishel

November 2020 Season Stuff

12/12/2020 Update:

Finals tomorrow! Good luck teams in our final 28-board KO matches.

11/28/2020 Update:

Captains,

We are moving the semifinal playoffs to Monday, Dec 7th, at 7pm ET due to a large number of conflicts with the NAOBC. We apologize for the change and understand that some teams may require alternate play dates. The final KOs will still place as planned on Sunday Dec 13th, 7pm ET.

Next, we want to thank everyone for making the first online GNYBA Winter League a success. We are planning another season to begin Jan 3rd, 2021. Please provide any and all feedback – most importantly, if you think your team will likely participate, let us know!

Round 4 Fastest Players: Moss vs Connors

This week’s fastest player shoutout goes to the match between David Moss, Andrew Rosenthal, Katherine Todd, and David Gurvich versus Ryan Connors, Randi Adelman, Owen Lien, and Marc Sylvester.

Someday, when we are all back at the physical clubs in NYC, we will hold a long-postponed awards dinner to celebrate the winners of the 2019 races, 2020 races, and league winners. We might even give a special prize to the individual or pair who is consistently the fastest player. However, I don’t recommend anyone deliberately try for the prize at the expense of playing well.

11/15/2020 Update:

We are pleased to announce details about the postseason playoffs. After Round 5 concludes, the top 4 teams from each bracket will qualify into a semifinal KO**.

GNYBA is happy to host the semifinal and final KOs, with the benefits of our usual NetBridge director, common boards, and our familiar Sunday evening time. Save the dates!

Semifinal KOs: Sunday, 7pm ET, December 6th, 2020
Final KOs: Sunday, 7pm ET, December 13th, 2020

**The top ranked team chooses either the 3rd or 4th ranked team as their semifinal opponent. Rankings are sorted by season Victory Points. If two teams are tied in VPs, we break the tie using their match record against each other, and finally with total season IMPs.

11/6/2020 Update:

Captains and spectators: we are very lucky to have selected hand analysis from a world class pro, GNYBA’s own David Gurvich. Whether or not you played in Round 1, check out some of the more interesting and IMP-swinging hands from last week…

Board 1

I’ll start with board 1 for 3 reasons. It was the first board of the tournament. At most tables EW had to decide how high to get and how to play the hand. NS had a normal lead which is costly.

At most tables 1H was opened in 3rd seat and West doubled. Continuations varied but eventually came to either 2nt or 3nt with some outliers. After an opening heart lead my partner took 9 tricks in 2nt by winning the Q, leading a diamond toward the KQ and returning to his hand with the heart A to lead a 2nd diamond up. That allowed him to score 3S+2H+3D+1C while the opponents could only take 3H+1D. Only 7/30 tables took 9 tricks in NT. Most tables started with an opening heart lead. As long as hearts aren’t 6-2 (and they don’t rate to be) this line provides the best chance.

While a spade lead guarantees 5 tricks for the defense there are interesting variants with a club or diamond lead. North wins the CK and shoots a heart through. How do you take 9 tricks now? Dummy wins the DQ. Now what?

Board 9

Rarely does a 6-6 hand want to defend or play some strain other than one of its 2 suits. 9 is not one of those rare hands. When evaluating these hands points aren’t counted, tricks are. At most tables the auction comes to you 1C-1D-pass or 1C-1D-1S. If you don’t have any idea what a forcing call is then just pick one of your suits and bid game in it. If you are among the lucky partnerships that have discussed what is forcing after partner overcalls then you can take things slower. At my table I was able to bid 2S forcing and followup with 4H.

Most pairs made 4H or 4S but a few pairs went down in 4S because of the 5-0 break after a club lead. Win the CA, take a heart finesse, ruff a club, and find out the bad news with a round of spades. Now you knock out the HA and are tapped again. If you draw trump now then you will go down as they have one more than you and ruff the 3rd round of hearts. On this hand South shows out on the 3rd club and has the spade length. That means you can draw that annoying extra trump from South using hearts instead of spades. As soon as South ruffs you have the remainder of the tricks. It’s an interesting technique where a running suit can be used to draw opposing trumps.

Board 13

An interesting hand where an excellent grand slam in diamonds is available. With 22 diamonds and 42 spades the play is trivial for 13 tricks, 7D+3S+2H+1C. 2/30 reached 7D with more pairs reaching game than slam. The most common contract was 3nt.

A typical bidding sequence was 1S-2D-3D-3NT. Now 3nt is an interesting matchpoint gamble but there are multiple reasons not to rush the matter. Partner is distributional and you have aces. There are a couple of scenarios where telling partner that 3nt is a playable spot can go very wrong. We already know the first one. 7D is cold on the actual hand. The second goes the other way, picture a very similar hand where the SA is replaced with the SQ. With an opening club lead you have 5D+2H+1C in 3nt and need the heart finesse to be on to make 9 tricks while either 5D or 4S is making. I don’t know about you but I prefer the 100% contract.

Better slam bidding requires picturing what partner can have. Here you picture partner with 5-4 shape and likely singleton in hearts or clubs. Slam is in the picture,very good controls(4 keycards) opposite an opening hand with shape. 3nt should be out of the picture as we’ve already pictured a typical hand where 5D makes and 3nt goes down. Bidding 4nt here isn’t useful, even if partner shows us the 1 or 0 keycards they have we won’t know what to do.

There are a few different ways to go. Here’s a 2/1 auction that I think is optimal.

1S-2D;3D-3H;3S-4C;4NT-5C (1 or 4);7D (partner can’t have 1).

4C is a q-bid and tells partner that 3H is also a cuebid for slam. At this point partner can do all sorts of things. Without slam interest partner can bid 4S (good spades) or 5D. Partner actually has a perfect hand to ask for keycards here once you’ve shown slam interest. Once partner takes control the auction gets to 7D fairly rapidly. Partner knows you don’t have 3 spades (AK covers that) and is looking at a singleton club opposite the A. Setting up spades seems plausible plus you might have a 6th diamond.

11/2/2020 Update:

We hope everyone enjoyed the first match!

Fun Fact: The Round 1 Fast Players Shoutout for this week goes to the match between Jordan Lampe, Christopher Moh, Ralph Buchalter,and Jeff Roman versus Ryan Connors, Randi Adelman, Marc Sylvester, and Owen Lien. They were the first match out of 15 to have both tables finished!

For full results, head on over to the leaderboard!

11/1/2020 Update:

It’s game day! Check your email gain for more instructions and conditions of contest. This note comes straight from the NetBridge / BridgeResults folks, who will be sending you your tournament invites on BBO:

The invitation to the tournament will look like an invitation to join as a substitute player – that is the main invitation and you should accept it.

We play 20 boards as a single segment (no break in between).

Also players who enter the match from board 11 can watch the first half but must leave the table at the start of board 10.

Most of you have seen the normal tournament invite when you see all 8 players involved plus a summary of the format. However, your invite will look like the screenshot below. Please accept it!

10/31/2020 Update:

You can see the latest leaderboard, rosters, and results on the bridge results page. In fact, by default that page should probably be where you look from now on… it will be linked off of the right-hand margin on gnyba.org if you ever forget it:

https://bridgeresults.org/o/2020_gnyba_league/2020_gnyba_leagues.asp

10/30/2020 Update:

The league leaderboard is up and running, and first round matchups posted! We have sent passwords to all team captains – please submit your lineup by Saturday 7pm ET. For the first round of the swiss, all matches were randomly drawn. There is no home team advantage and everyone submits the lineup by the same deadline.

Each match is 20 boards, broken into two segments. However, each week you must select your lineup prior to the match. That means you can not first see the results from boards 1-10 to determine who plays and how you want to seat your team for boards 11-20.

For roster changes, send name and bbo usernames to league-support@gnyba.org

10/29/2020 Update:

Team Captains, please check your email in the next 24 hours for instructions on league procedures, your next round matchup, and how to set your team lineup. Also, confirm the contact information we have for your team is correct (a link in the same email).

The Weekly Procedure

We will supply each captain with a link to fill out their lineup for the week. That means selecting the BBO username from your roster for each of the N/S/E/W seats. If you plan to swap any players for the second half (boards 11 to 20), then you can also specify on the same form.

If you need to use a replacement player for the week, someone not on your roster, then email us (league-support@gnyba.org). Because this is a friendly league, we will be allowing friendly rules for subs and replacement players. No one wants a forfeit, and we rely on good sportsmanship and integrity to make the league work.

Roster Snapshot