Gold Points! Endless Summer Regional June 25-28

Posted on June 12, 2020 by Lee Lin

For those who missed the previous online gold point regional, there is another chance two weeks from now!

Update 6/26/2020: For More Information on the Endless Summer Regional
Gold Point Awards Reduced 20% for this regional
Make sure you know which ACBL Convention Chart applies to your event
Understand the rules of the Side Game Series

Here is the ACBL Endless Summer Regional June 2020 schedule.

Tons of Stratification ! (99/499/750/1250/2500/3500/Open)

Looking at the schedule, they have created many more granular stratified events. In fact, there are more stratification levels than any regional ever held by ACBL – including at NABCs. In addition to the usual suspects: 99er, Gold Rush, Mid-Flight and Open, there are three ‘in-between” stratifications. There is a 499er, a super gold rush (up to 1250), and a super midflight (up to 3500). Strangely, there is no 299er.

Load Balancing Plus Skill Balancing

Part of the benefits for all these strats is the load balancing. Hopefully each tournament is equally popular, and given the different starting times, most people could play in two different two-session events on the same day. That is, if you are a Mid-Flight type of player, you would play the 10:30am and 2pm schedule for 0-3500, then play the 5:30pm and 9pm sechedule for 0-2500.

If you are a Gold Rush player, you can do a similar four-session schedule starting at 10:45am and 2:15pm for 0-1250, then again at 5:45pm and 9:15pm.

All Pairs, No Teams. All Matchpoints, No IMPs

For those who like teams, sorry. It seems this regional is still all pairs, as BBO and ACBL work furiously to make team play and swiss work in a mass tournament setting. You can always set up your own team games among friends for free on BBO.

The No Man’s Land Limited Games?

This is the fun one – you might find yourself in the spot between 750-1250. For the first time in perhaps years, you will once again be eligible for the expanded gold rush up to 1250, and then you can follow up with the lower Mid-Flight 0-2500. The timing will be a little tight but it should work.

Horizontal Side Game Series

For those who don’t want to play 2x or 4x on the same day, you can instead slice your time horizontally across the days. If you want to play at 10am all four days, then the Side Game Series is for you. As usual, they combine your best two session for each series – so if you go this route, make sure you group your sessions wisely.

You either want to do Thursday and Friday, or Saturday and Sunday. The disaster is Friday + Saturday, as you will be playing a separate series each day.

Ribbon Colors for the New Strats?

Most people shouldn’t care much about ribbon qualifiers, but it’s fun to acquire your first few. As usual, the single session 99er and 499er events do not provide gold points and do not provide ribbons.

Most people know that Gold Rush through 750 pays Red Ribbon Qualifiers and open games pay Blue Ribbon Qualifiers if you get overall 1st or 2nd for the day. How about the weird in-between strats? Here is the relevant rule from the ACBL site:

First and second (including ties) in all Gold Point Regionally-Rated Events with no upper masterpoint limit or with an upper masterpoint limit of more than 1500 masterpoints.

Ok, so the expanded Gold Rush to 1250 will still pay Red Ribbon Qualifiers. The Mid-Flight 0-2500 and higher pay Blue Ribbon Qualfiers. Some day we will need a special post on how to use these ribbon qualifiers, and why ACBL needs to seriously revamp the entire ribbon system.

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Fairfield Regional Cancelled

Posted on June 6, 2020 by Lee Lin

As expected, District 3 cancelled the Fairfield Regional originally scheduled for early July. It’s too bad, I always had fond memories of Fairfield, because it is the last regional for New Yorkers prior to Summer NABC. It was the second regional I ever attended following the May 2018 Big Apple Regional, and my first Red Ribbon Qualifier (before I realized spending them is harder than earning them).

Summer Plans?

As for bridge this summer, many of us are taking a small break following a marathon week of silver point games. Some folks got enough points that they will never need to go to Allendale ever again. My performance was lackluster, but tons of fun. I apologize for all the partners I let down! Perhaps all the time with robots made me forget the human elements of the game.

Online Individual NABC?

Even though Montreal NABC is cancelled, I expect an online individual NABC, and possibly something much more elaborate as we approach what would have been the NABCs, GNTs, and Tokyo Olympics. Stay tuned to hear the latest – I have doubts anyone will earn platinum points online, but there will likely be more gold and silver chances soon.

District GNTs Still Going!

One piece of news – previous all GNT flights were in the middle of their District KO matches. Understandably, with no NABC event, there is less at stake for winning the District finals. But there is still a lot of gold points at stake. We will be finishing the KO matches on BBO. Captains can request a Zoom Monitor if there are any security concerns, or if they just want the thrill of at least one kibitzer. Full bracket updates coming soon.

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Honestly It Feels Like NABC Right Now

Posted on May 31, 2020 by Lee Lin

We all missed Columbus and Montreal NABCs, but right now Silver Linings Week is the closest proxy. The turnout has been so successful, even the virtual club operators are surprised. Almost every club has augmented their daily schedule to squeeze in up to 3 sessions per day, possibly 4 if you time things exactly right.

It feels like NABC – you can wake up to begin playing nearly nonstop sessions of bridge for about 8 hours straight. Then rinse and repeat the next day. After a while, you forget which day of the week it is – what does it matter anyway? The only thing missing is the post-bridge hanging out at the hotel bar – but you can replicate the drinking at home if you choose.

How To Chain Your Sessions

It turns out, you need to do some planning to make 8+ hours of bridge work. Being a member of multiple Virtual Private Clubs provides more options, but it’s up to you to work out a consolidated road map and schedule. Yesterday, I tried:

12:30pm Pink Section with All For One (24 board game)
3:45pm Yellow Section: officially 18 boards lasting 126 minutes.
5:45pm Green Section with Sagamore (Amazingly, BBO allowed me to register)

Thankfully, the 3:45pm game JUST in time – had the directors allowed some rounds to drag out to the full time, we likely would have been kicked out of the 5:45pm.

The Most Unpopular Game?

For club operators, note that the 5pm starting time games have turned out to be the least popular. For anyone playing the afternoon 12:30 and 1pm sessions, they are looking for a 2nd session right away – making 3:45pm perfect. That can chain into evening games, but 5pm is too early for most.

Late Night Games?

For people waiting for evening sessions, 5:45pm is the earliest it gets, tapering off by 7:15pm for All For One. For those who want the midnight KO experience, the Alliance late night speed ball was the closest proxy – 12 fast boards at 9:15pm, only Mon – Thu.

Anyone Tried Four In A Day?

In theory, it is possible to sneak in 4 sessions, even with no speed balling. Perhaps even 5 if you start with a 10am, followed by an evening 7:30pm.

During the real NABCs, 4 sessions is no longer possible unless you count Midnight Zip Knockouts. You can do the Daylight Schedule (10am + 3pm), then an evening side swiss or side series at 7:30pm. Alternatively, you can opt for a morning side series, while doing the 1pm and 7pm schedule (most Platinum NABC+ events are on the afternoon cycle).

There is no way to sneak in a session during the gap in your 2-session event. Perhaps someday they will invent a half-session side series? Some seasoned veterans tell me there USED to be, long ago, a schedule that allowed 4 legitimate sessions plus midnight knockouts. Can anyone confirm?

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Online Bridge: Field Scouting And Registration Sniping

Posted on May 28, 2020 by Lee Lin

If you are a very strong player reading this, you will have no idea what I’m talking about today, except that it seems like a huge waste of energy.

For the rest, let’s admit at some point in our bridge lives, we’ve scoped out the scene prior to registering. I write this with four different viable Silver Lining games to choose in the next two hours. All same price, paying triple silver, and hosted by friendly clubs we want to support!

What Is Tournament Scouting And Why Do It?

Field scouting has been around for ages. Everyone wants a large field where they will feel competitive – it shouldn’t be stomp, nor do they want to get stomped. But above all, there must be enough tables to avoid the dreaded Howell movement slips of paper – not an issue online.

Stakes are even higher when you travel – who wants to make the trek to Woodbridge and come back empty-handed two days in a row? For those who truly don’t care about their masterpoints, the deciding factor might be playing among friends. As strange as it seems, yes, I enjoy being in the same field as my friends, cherishing those 21 minutes together.

Scouting In The Pre-Covid Era

In a live regional, you can walk up to the registration desk and see where the brackets are falling, complete with the master point totals of anyone who registered. If you are deciding between Gold Rush or Open, you might just look around the room and see who you know from the club. You can greet them and casually ask what game they are playing. For the introverts, just glance at the color of their entry slip.

Scouting In the BBO Virtual Private Club World

On to the virtual world. You can see the purchased entries for any tournament from 2 hours prior to start. Why do people register early? Mostly for convenience – once registered, both of you go about your business until the start time. There is no fear of capacity selling out, or any server crashes robbing you of your last minute entry.

Sometimes you spot a golden member, meaning LOTS of online bridge experience.

You can see which of your friends have registered, including all those people you friended who haven’t friended you back! (Edit: we decided on the game where we know the most people)

Registration Sniping?

Ok, so far everything is normal. But I’ve noticed another practice I’ll call registration sniping, and it is unique to online bridge. In a live game, the directors will be VERY upset if you register at the last minute (people do it anyway).

However, on BBO, I’ve noticed some games see a huge volatile uptick of registrations about 2 minutes prior to the start time. Was everyone waiting until the last minute to find a partner? Or perhaps they were finishing another session and didn’t pre-register?

I’m willing to bet at least some pairs are scouting out two games, deciding last minute which one to join! Will anyone reading confess to some combination of scouting and sniping?

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Getting a 100% Game Day – Double Headers Are Tough?

Posted on May 26, 2020 by Lee Lin

Director Yefim once told my BAM teammates at the end of a Harmonie Club game, “Congratulations. Your team got a 100% game today.”

Our E/W pair had a 63% matchpoints game going in to the last round, and my partnership was the team N/S pair sitting at 37%. Together our scores added up to 100%. Indeed, with one pair at section top and one pair at section bottom, the BAM results can easily go both ways.

Two Sessions of Silver Lining Per Day, Four Partners

So far I’ve played 4 sessions of silver lining, trying hard to rotate my play equally among my previous favorite partners and venues.

Afternoon open game at All For One: 60.85% (3.24 Silver)
Good ole Monday Night with Tom and Yefim: 43.38% (0.66 Silver – yay Strat C)

Weekday Afternoon at Shore Bridge Club: 61.00% (2.94 Silver)
Aces / Cavendish Aaron Silverstein Game: 39.38% (Sad Trombone)

Schedule Coming Up Later This Week

With only limited data points, it seems my 1st session of the day has been the better game. If you are one of my partners, take note! Whatever my morning score is, the afternoon is nearly 100% – morning.

Anyway, some remaining games I plan to play for Silver Lining week, as I leave the hibernation of robot only bridge:

Sagamore “Alliance” Green Section
University Club Open Pairs
All For One Pink Section
Twenty Boards For $20 Bucks with James
Mid-Flight 0-3500 always in the mid-afternoon
More Honors Open

Will There Be More Online Silver?

If you didn’t make plans for this Silver Linings Week, I’d say you’ll get more chances.

Table counts point to a very successful promotion at the club level. The gold point online regional early May was also record shattering on many fronts. There are active proposals to allow Districts and Units to hold their own online events soon, but let’s be careful. Players always love when it’s raining masterpoints, but we should plan for the long term about and think through changes that are hard to undo.

Regardless, I still need quite a few for LM, and I don’t expect to get nearly enough all this week.

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Silver Point Week – Special Game Schedule

Posted on May 24, 2020 by Lee Lin

As a reminder, all Virtual Private Club games from May 25-31 will award silver points, and triple the amount! We are still unclear on whether the triple points is off of the usual virtual private club’s 50% increase, or just triple a normal club game. We will know starting tomorrow. Also remember, the silver points and bonus ONLY applies to virtual private club games, not the speedballs or ACBL nationwide support your club events.

Special Game Schedule at All For One

Most GNYBA members are part of the All For One virtual club. If you haven’t regularly been playing in any other private club game, you are likely blocked unless BOTH you and your partner have played in the physical club prior to the Covid-19 closures in 2019 or 2020.

The most notable change for All For One – there is an open game in the evening each night. The start times are never on the hour (other than the 2pm 299er), to avoid conflicts with various nationwide ACBL speed balls and other events. Apparently the servers would crash if too many games start at exactly the same time.

Wed Evening IMPs

For those who enjoy IMPs, you can try Wednesday Evening at All For One. For now, there are no ACBL team events available online. In the near future, there is ongoing chatter about allowing districts and units to host online regionals and sectionals. But it will take some time before we ever see widespread online Swiss or Round Robin games. A first pass proposal would be knockouts, which are easier to setup.

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Bridge Base Multiple Server Confusion

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Lee Lin

The good news is, Bridge Base is upgrading their infrastructure! That means they should be in much better shape to handle the huge influx of online players that have joined while sheltering-in-place.

Your Friends Might Be On The Casual Server

As with all technology roll-outs, there are some quirks to work out. Right now the weirdest one is finding your friends. Normally, the people tab on the right shows you whether your friends are online.

Apparently 5 friends online, but not the ones I was looking to find!

Turns out the “Casual” section takes you into a whole new server, with a completely separate set of friends who are online. So if your friend starts a casual table, you won’t find them until you poke your head into the casual section.

Oops, the other friends are in the Casual server

Hopefully messaging and chatting will work across the two servers, but I haven’t tested it out. For now, the only thing to know is you aren’t getting the full picture of whether your friends are online or not. You or they might be on the other server, so for now you need to pop back and forth between the two.

Invitations Do Not Cross Servers

Also, the most common way I set up a table is “Start a table with 3 robots”, which apparently is on the Casual Server. If you reserve and invite your friends, they won’t receive the invitations until they click into the Casual Server. Confused yet? Let’s hope this doesn’t last too long…

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Silver Linings Week May 25-31

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Lee Lin

With the Big Apple Regional cancelled, ACBL is instead replacing our Memorial Day Weekend with Silver Linings Week! Virtual Private Clubs have received notice that club games will pay triple the normal amount, and all in silver!

Only Virtual Private Clubs

Keep in mind this only applies to Virtual Private Club games, not the generic nationwide Support Your Club ACBL game. If you’ve never done the Virtual Private Clubs, now is a great time to try and play at least one game, to make sure you are “on the list.”

ACBL requires virtual private club owners to restrict their games to players that have played in the physical club sometime in the past 365 days. But there are plenty of reasons why your BBO account might not be on the list. Give it a try now so you aren’t kicked out when it counts.

Entry Fees To Be Determined?

ACBL always charges the clubs a slightly higher sanction fee when awarding silver points. It doesn’t break the bank, but it will be interesting to see which clubs absorb the cost and which ones pass it through to the players.

Better Than STaC Week (If You Have Enough Tables)

ACBL is careful to say this is NOT a STaC. Your results will not be combined with other clubs to achieve an overall award. The formula is also different, with no STaC week flat bounty and a deeper slope. Instead, they will only use the table count in your specific virtual club game and multiply by 0.3 to award overall points to 1st place.

If there are 20 tables, then overall first would pay 6.0 silver (instead of the usual 2.0 black in a physical club, and 3.0 black in a virtual club). Normally during STaC week, a 20 table game would pay only 5.63 silver. However, if you have fewer than 16 or fewer tables in your game, then STaC week might have been better.

Life Master From Home!

It’s finally here. A chance to become a Virtual Life Master entirely playing from home. If you were lucky enough to get enough gold points during the Online Regional events, then this is your chance to bank lots of silver. You can get all the black you need playing with robots.

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Bridge Adventures: Omaha With Buffett, Gates, Hamman, and Osberg

Posted on May 7, 2020 by Lee Lin

Once upon a time when I had under 5 masterpoints, I worked at some nerdy quantitative hedge funds. We managed money using math and computers while taking advantage of leverage and relatively high turnover strategies. But I always respected value investing and buy-and-hold indexing, and there is no better guru than Warren Buffett.

Tiny glimpse of our crew one and two tables away

Annual Trips To Omaha

For years, a group of friends made annual trips to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in early May. Just like at the bridge club, our crew immediately stood out, probably because we looked decades younger than the median attendee. It’s an immersive experience of 20,000+ visitors, and I always leave with an energized mindset and new perspectives on investing, frugality, and life priorities. Unfortunately, this year the pandemic required a virtual meeting with 0 attendees – but today marks my bridge in Omaha anniversary.

I was dummy so had time to sneak in a selfie

Did Not Recognize Any Superstars

Every year, they hold a shareholder bridge event. It’s completely casual, shuffle-and-play bridge right after a boozy brunch. Unfortunately, I was a novice player who barely knew how to bid. We were waiting in line to play and Bob Hamman introduced himself as a shareholder who does some IT consulting, giving us his business card.

Later I’m playing against Sharon Osberg and we talked about places to play bridge online. She said, “Oh yes, try Bridge Base Online. That’s my site.” I thought she meant it was her go-to site, not literally HER site. They were so friendly and down-to-earth, and we were probably rowdy and buzzed.

Somehow stumbled into 4Hx making 6 here – a total fix and beginners luck

Competitive Versus Casual Bridge

Maybe we offended people. Maybe they secretly loved not being treated as celebrities for a change. But it was a great time and critically import for taking up bridge later. Our group included Chris Moh and Mee Warren, who later became my first GNT and Big Apple Regional partners, kicking off my actual bridge journey 4 years later.

No idea who took this video and why we are in it. Chris Moh later switched to red Adidas…

Most of us have memories from when we first learned bridge, and it was probably a much more casual and entertaining experience than our typical tournament play today. Do you ever long for the early days, when everything was just fun and low key? Do you enjoy bridge more today, or when you first began?

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Online Regional Awards 49.99 Gold For Two Sessions

Posted on May 5, 2020 by Lee Lin

In probably the largest payout ever for a non-NABC regional, one-day event, one pair received 49.99 Gold for first overall in the open pairs. We were predicting a prize over 50 last week, based on the usual ACBL formula.

Formula Changed?

The normal formula should have awarded well over 50, because there were nearly 400 concurrent gold rush tables to go with the 200 or so open tables. Perhaps ACBL changed the formula for these massive online events?

Cheating A Concern?

We posted a discussion to BridgeWinners, and the commentary quickly turned into whether we should be concerned with online cheating. We all know it’s possible to cheat, whether online or live, but thankfully the vast majority never even consider it.

Personally, I don’t believe there is much cheating. We’ve all been in a situation where we have the setting trick, if only partner finds the right shift. We’ve all let opponents make a slam missing two aces. And we’ve all benefited from making a contract that never should have made, except the opponent’s had some horrible misunderstanding.

I have never had a partner discuss, even jokingly, about cheating, other than comments about pros who have gotten cheating (the coughing doctors might need a new signal in a Covid-19 world). I’ve had multiple times where I knew I was giving partner a likely ruff, but I needed a moment to consider which suit preference card to play. Right after I play my card, I finally catch my partner’s facial expression, and he or she often has the perfect poker face on.

Granted, perhaps the stoic face WOULD be a giveaway that something is going on, because if partner was chatty or obviously distracted, there is probably nothing going on. That’s probably why I just try not to look at partner’s face ever, and instead on the cards played.

I wish I had more stories, but to my knowledge no one has ever attempted to cheat me in bridge. The closest thing is opponents who misremembered tricks, or typed the wrong score into the BridgeMate, or accused me of revoking when I did not. But I honestly suspect those were honest mistakes.

Anyone else have a cheating story?

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