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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Chance To Become Life Master In Just One Day!

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Lee Lin

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.

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Online Gold Point Overload

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Lee Lin

Unfortunately, BBO seems completely swamped as we kick off the first online regional, promising to give away tons of gold and red points. Speaking of kicking off, I got disconnected just now from the crowded overload. If you can’t get in right now, you aren’t alone!

What Is The Occassion?

For those who haven’t heard, today is the first day of a weekend long Save Your Regional event. Each day offers two-session pairs events that pays gold points to overall winners plus session top winners, just like in a typical regional event (or regionally rated NABC event). There are also a few one-session intermediate-newcomer 299er events, which pay only red points.

Here is the full schedule of the Spring 2020 Online Regional.

What If You Get Kicked Off?

Unfortunately, the directors usually can’t do a whole lot for you if you are disconnected. But they can adjust the board so you get the result you “should” have gotten. However, if you are kicked off for an extended period through no fault of your own, you might have to skip the board. If too many people have connectivity issues, they will just have to cancel the tournament and refund the entry fees. It’s happened in the past. Let’s hope not this time!

Note that Virtual Private Club directors have slightly more discretion. Sometimes they can swap in a substitute house player to play for you and finish out the game. However, an ACBL Regional is going to be more strict.

Short answer, if you get kicked off – keep trying to get back on! And don’t panic too much…

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Win ACBL Gold Points Online April 30 to May 3rd 2020

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Lee Lin

Just when we thought it would be impossible to get lots of gold points online, ACBL comes through with the upcoming “Stay At Home, Play At Home” tournament. I also completely missed the ACBL Club Championship that happened this past week. It goes to show that even a few days off the grid means missing important updates!

Gold Points In the Past

Previously, the only way to get gold points was from playing in two-session or longer NABC and regional events. Then ACBL invented the REACH tournaments – which stood for something. Perhaps Regional At Club House? Anyway, that only gave meager amounts that hardly anyone ever won.

Online Gold Points?

For online bridge, the three ACBL Online Individual NABC events gave gold and red to overall winners. Those are very fun events, but they are a little pricey at $50 ($40 early bird, and $34 for returning competitors). Also, they require playing 72 robot boards, and some people prefer not to play any robot boards!

Stay At Home, Play At Home!

The cost is $15 per player per session. In practice, you will want to play two sessions unless you are doing the 299er. Single session play means you won’t get overall awards

It looks like there are stratified events for all. There are two-session gold rush pairs Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Even single-session 299er Pairs on Friday May 1st (those only offer red points). All four days offer open pairs, stratified at 0-1500, 1500-3500, and 3500+.

That’s a slightly odd set of masterpoint buckets. I’m surprised they don’t try a full-fledged “mid-flight” pairs event for 0-3000, followed by an open pairs. Does anyone doubt they will have enough tables? I suspect they might fill quickly!

So far, no team events. Hopefully they have bracketed teams or knockouts soon – but I don’t think the software is setup for that yet. Still, I’m impressed at the pace of BBO and ACBL innovation in the past 6 weeks. We can try all sorts of new formats that were never practical in the past: Swiss BAM pairs? Bracketed Round Robins with very short rounds and many teams? We can even do zip KOs and all sorts of handicapped games. I’m eager to see what they come up with next (yes we know, online silver points).

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Who Are The Popular Bridge Streamers?

Posted on April 25, 2020 by Lee Lin

I recently discovered Bridge Overlord, the twitch streamer. It was amazingly entertaining to watch, although it’s clearly not going to attract newcomers to the game. More likely, bridge streaming could be a stepping stone for beginner and intermediate players to enjoy the game more. Almost all the popular online esports have a vibrant ecosystem of streamers – why not bridge?

Why Would Anyone Watch Someone Else For Hours?

To be clear, by esports, we generally mean video games such as DOTA, League of Legends, and Hearthstone. Most people instantly wonder, “why would anyone watch someone ELSE play video games?” Well, 10 years ago most venture capitalists also wondered the same thing and chose NOT to invest in Twitch.tv. Founders Justin Kan and Michael Siebel eventually sold it for $970 million to Amazon.

Twitch.tv was actually a pivot from justin.tv, an even more wacky idea that eventually raised $7 million from investors such as Y Combinator, Bessemer, and Thrive. It was a wild idea to just watch one person’s life, Justin, all day every day in a Truman Show manner. Somewhere along the way, they figured out there is an audience of people who want to watch gamers. The growth was incredible, and the rest is history.

How Do We Make Bridge Interesting To Watch?

For those who watch Vugraphs, you probably don’t need too much convincing. But Vugraphs require a lot of resources – the vugraph operator, BBO, the commentators, and of course 8 world class players worth watching?

Is there a market for watching someone do their ACBL Speedballs or even their robot tournaments? BridgeOverlord201 is reasonably entertaining. It’s comforting to know even expert players get into bidding disasters here and there. You be the judge!

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Twenty Daylongs, Twenty Black Points

Posted on April 19, 2020 by Lee Lin

Earlier I pledged to finish out the remainder of my black points required for Life Master playing entirely in Support Your Club Events. As an update, I’ve hit my goal, beginning with the first Support Your Club daylong on March 25th, and competing almost daily since then.

Field Is Getting Harder

I suspected early on there would be an adjustment period as new players join BBO and experience their first robotic partnership. There are so many little nuances you learn as you play against the robots more. Ultimately, I firmly believe the robots have made me a better player, but it’s very possible to pick up bad habits. We will see when I make the transition back to humans…

In my first 10 Daylongs, I averaged a 60.34% matchpoints score, earning 11.11 black points. For the second group of 10, I averaged 57.02%, and scored 8.25 black points. It’s possible I’ve hit a dry spell, but I notice the field shrinking daily. There were about 1000 tables on the first March 25th daylong, but only 663 on April 16th. With so many virtual club game options now, some players are probably finding they just prefer human games. Those who stay with the Daylongs have figured out some of the robot quirks (hint: robots play 0314, not 1430).

Raw Results

3/25, 74.11%, 2.50
3/27, 52.90%, 0.75
3/28, 65.00%, 1.40
3/29, 62.53%, 1.00
3/30, 66.67%, 2.00
3/31, 54.68%, 0.56
4/1,  59.58%, 1.05
4/2,  63.15%, 1.05
4/3,  51.18%, 0.40
4/4,  53.62%, 0.40
4/5,  62.09%, 1.05
4/6,  61.06%, 1.00
4/7,  66.43%, 2.00
4/9,  56.54%, 1.05
4/10, 53.23%, 0.75
4/11, 52.49%, 0.30
4/13, 53.86%, 0.12
4/14, 50.79%, 0.53
4/15, 52.33%, 0.40
4/16, 61.38%, 1.05

After twenty daylongs and 180 boards, I averaged 58.68% and 19.36 points. Not quite 20 as promised in the title, but let’s round up since we’re among friends!

Done For Now

With $100 donated to clubs and $20 on top going to BBO, I think it’s time to come out of the shell and go back to human games! There are many choices now in the “All For One” club, formerly Honors plus 7 other affiliated local clubs. I also received more than the required black points – but now I am going to be stuck at 18 silver shy of the LM requirement.

Online Sectionals?!?

All that’s left on the road to life master is silver and total points. Will we see some human online sectionals soon? To be honest, I hope we do not. Not even STaC week.

As much as we would all love reaching Life Master more easily, I’m rooting for a return to live bridge, and a return to the Allendale, the new Woodbridge, and STaC week days (plus that elusive NYC sectional which someday still needs to happen). Besides, I would prefer to cross that 500 threshold among a crew of my favorite friends, partners, directors, opponents, and enemies. Do I really want to my celebratory Life Master moment to be with 3 robots at home?

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