As a software guy, I know it is very difficult to make significant interface changes that please everyone. Some faction of users will complain about something the old system did more effectively. We always hope the new features heavily outweigh whatever complaints crop up. People come to appreciate the new design, and then all is good.
ACBL Live For Clubs?
That said, what does everyone think about ACBL Live for clubs? It certainly is better for tracking individual performance, as I can quickly find all of my games and results going back to last May. If I happened to be the result-stalking type, then I could also look up other players just as easily.
Here is what isn’t ideal about the new interface:
It is noticeably slower regardless of internet connection
It is not as efficient for recapping all concurrent games
You need to click on other each section to see all the results
For board recaps, it’s much harder to see what people did in other sections
It does not mention whether your award is section or overall, and which stratification, the old (SA) (OB) etc.
If the open game had sections A and B, you start off only seeing section A. If there is a 0-750 concurrent game, you won’t even see it without clicking to a different file
All told, there are clear benefits to the new ACBL Live for Clubs. But there are cases where I wish for the old mode – unfortunately that may no longer exist. What does everyone think?
For those going to Allendale this weekend for yet another NJ sectional, good luck!
We are back from our travels and jet-lagged for quite some time. That means no 2-session events for me, and no driving. Even the usual Honors evening circuit will be a stretch. But it gives plenty of time in the odd hours of the night to practice alone.
How To Practice Alone?
There are plenty of ways to sharpen your game without a dozen tables of opponents, and possibly even without your partner! There is a crowd that enjoys reading books, and the monthly bridge bulletin has excellent columns for developing and advanced players.
For those who want a more interactive experience, almost everyone has their own favorite online lesson set. I happened to get my start using Audrey Grant’s BetterBridge interactive lessons – and I still pay for my subscription years later!
Enter BridgeBase
The big game changer is BridgeBase. Some people absolute hate playing bots for various reasons, others love it and play too much. The most common objections are that players who score well against bots know how to trick the bots with strange bidding plays. Next most frustrating, defending with a bot partner means receiving seemingly random carding signals, with almost no regard to your carding. One last objection is that playing with bots is generally not free – but it’s only $1 a week to fill your table with 3 basic bots!
A No Bidding, No Carding, Free Technique
Get it while it lasts – you can actually play 100% for free, for as many boards as you want, all day and every day, and you never have to learn how to bid or defend with a bot.
Log into BBO, click on Challenges, and try Challenge a Robot. You can set it to Just Declare mode, and try your best for free against the Basic bots. In fact, I recommend keeping a running tally of your results over many short matches against the bots, again with Just Declare mode turned on – hat tip to Jordan Lampe for the idea.
As soon as your 8 boards are complete, you get a comparison against the robot opponent. Try enough times and most players will lose – but at least you can review the boards to see what the bot did differently! Uday once reported that the Basic bot beats 91% of humans, and the Advanced bot beats 98% or so.
Is the Challenger Opponent Also Basic or Advanced?
The one question where I’m still unclear – when you pay the extra $0.25 for an advanced bot, it certainly applies to the defenders at the table (and your partner if it were not Just Declare mode). But how about the other table, with your bot opponent? I have a suspicion that even without paying the premium, your opponent is an Advanced bot playing against Basic bots, but I could be wrong. Can anyone confirm?
Two upcoming regional tournaments offer some variant of knockouts that guarantee all registered teams play for the entire day. Traditionally, a knockout means that once your team loses, you no longer need to play, your overall points have already been determined, and you no longer owe further card fees (you pay per round, and keep paying as long as your team keeps surviving).
The Knockout Problem
Some consider knockouts one of the more pure forms of bridge. I’m not sure why everyone uses the word “pure”, but it sounds like people refer to minimizing luck, maximizing skill, and most importantly reducing noise from an unpredictable field.
When you register for a traditional knockout, you initially pay for only one round. Directors place you in a bracket of up to 16 (these days usually 9). You play one match of 24 boards against one other team and see who has more IMPs at the end. The winning team survives and pays for the next round. If you had a three-way, probably two teams survive and pay (which is why brackets of 9 is a magic number). Win four rounds and you are the overall winners.
There are two problems. First, you commit to two days (four sessions), which not everyone wants to do. They created compact knock outs that are only 12-board matches which tries to solve the problem, but those tend to be even less popular. The bigger problem: it’s hard to plan your playing schedule. If your team loses the morning match, you either take the afternoon off or scramble into some one-session event that isn’t very satisfying (some teams catch early trains home).
Introducing A Solution: KIKO / KOIAD
Tarrytown and Cromwell have solutions. They are called Knock In / Knock Out, and Knock Out In A Day.
Instead of a bracket of 16, you are placed into a bracket of 8.
Instead of 2 sessions per day of 24 boards each, you squeeze in 3 sessions of 18 boards.
Instead of paying as you go, round by round, you pay up front for the whole day.
If you lose the morning match, you are knocked out but then automatically enter into a swiss teams event along with others knocked out teams, including those from other brackets of 8 (if there are enough teams, it could be bracketed swiss). The swiss is 36 boards and 6 rounds, and pays gold point overalls to the winners. Teams can also register separately for the Swiss, so it isn’t just a massive consolation swiss, but everyone starts fresh with a 0 score.
If you win the morning match, you have Knocked In to the semifinals! Except remember, there were only 8 teams in the bracket to start, so only top 3 spots should pay overalls.
If you won the first but lose the second round, you still play the final round against the other semi-final losing team, competing for 3rd place. The winner of that round still qualifies for overall awards (this is currently under review by ACBL).
If you win the first and second rounds, great job! You are in the finals just like in a normal KO or compact KO, and you play the final 18 boards to see who gets 1st vs 2nd.
A few noteworthy district winners made it to the top nationwide slots – they will be in the printed Bridge Bulletin in the coming months.
Wendy Wen finished 11th in the 5-20 bracket. Nicole Hudak took 8th in the 100-200 bracket. Tim Archdeacon won 3rd nationwide in the 200-300 bracket. Siqing Yu was 13th for 500-1000, after winning his bracket last year. Dan Lev and Yoko Sobel took 6th and 7th in the 1000-1500 bracket. Sam Amer 3rd in the 1500-2500. Giorgia Botta and Leonardo Fruscoloni took 8th and 9th for 2500-3500. Joe Grue came 3rd in the “over 10,000” bracket.
Nationwide Mini-McKenny Race Winners
Four individuals in our district won the nationwide race (and we really mean North American-wide). All of them should begin preparing a bio and headshot for the Bridge Bulletin!
Matthew Gordon won the nationwide 200-300 with 439.69 points earned. Ruth Fleischmann won for 300-500 with 452.77 points earned. Gillian Miniter won 3500-5000 with 1608.02 points earned. Radu Nistor repeated his prior nationwide victory with 1170.22.
Hello and Happy New Year! Today our travels take us to Shibuya in Tokyo, Japan, home of the Shibuya Bridge Center. After a cold email inquiry to the website contact address, Tadashi Teramoto replied in excellent English telling us he could find us teammates for Swiss the next day.
ACBL and JCBL Conversion
The Japan Contract Bridge League uses your ACBL masterpoints to determine your stratification and bracket when you enter a JCBL event. However, in Japan they apparently haven’t seen the same levels of inflation we experienced here in the US. Life master in JCBL is still 300 masterpoints, which apparently takes ages to achieve.
You might be surprised to see the Stop card in use again, and someone even threw it out prior to opening a strong 2C. You never announce any bids – transfers and forcing 1NT are alerted. Pairs playing weak 1NT should pre-alert; and you don’t pick up your bidding cards until the defender plays the opening lead.
Shibuya Bridge Center
Most of the world was still in New Year mode on Saturday morning, Jan 4th, but Shibuya Bridge Center was full of energy and buzz. We found our teammates, who thankfully seemed super friendly and wouldn’t mind if we brought back plenty of “lose 12” boards.
The card fee for 2-sessions was 3200 JPY a person, comparable to a team event in Woodbridge or Allendale. That included a “Sandwich Lunch” break in the middle – and amazingly every table had a dedicated tablecloth to deploy just before the break (it must be North’s job, because it was under the North bidding box mini-table).
Lunch Break with Tablecloth
We previously discussed how players appreciate clubs that can provide Swiss Teams with hand records. However, in Japan they take things to another level. By the lunch break, some cool constraints have been met:
You have played the first half of all your matches
Your teammates have also played those boards, so you can discuss
The boards were all pre-duplicated
You don’t need to compare scores – the BridgeMate and tournament software did
You get a preliminary Victory Point total and rank based on the half-match
For the second session, you will play the second half of each match – against the OTHER pair of each team. That is, if you played say the North/South pair in the morning, you will play their East/West pair in the afternoon for the back half of the match. At the end of the day, you get a Victory Point score against each team based on the IMPs of both morning and afternoon.
Some people seemed to get more colorful tablecloths. Perhaps the pros bring their own?
Lost And Found – Cultural Differences
Most of us have seen the Lost & Found table at Honors – you can find about 50 old convention card holders left behind over the years (I used to think frequent players were granted a storage cubby hole). Things in Asia are no different; people leave things behind and the club owners are too nice to throw things away outright. Except, here the most commonly left behind item seems to be tea thermoses, mini-fans, and hand towels.
One last point about leaving your bidding cards on the table until the opening lead. It sounds like a good idea at first – you won’t have to recap the bidding. But I found it awkward for two reasons. First, as dummy you have to dodge the bidding cards when you lay out your cards – either that or delay everyone by picking up your bidding cards, THEN showing dummy. Second, my left-hand defender kept accumulating all my pass cards – for some reason they kept scooping it up (maybe I encroach too much to the left when I bid).
To all participants of the 2019 Big Apple Winter Regional, we hope you had a fun and successful tournament! On behalf of the GNYBA we would like to thank all of the directors, caddies, volunteers and especially the players for making it happen. Please plan to play in our 2020 regionals back at the Hilton – each with new dates:
May 25 – 30 (starting on Memorial Day) November 8 – 13 Full results from this week available through ACBL Live. Here are some final updates:
Master Point Races Congratulations to the winners of all of the Master Point Races.
The open race ended in a 3 way tie between Max Rotaru, John Kranyak and Susie Schnelwar. Winners of the other races each won $100. Wendy Wen won the 0-300 race. Matthew Gordon won the 300-750 race (last year he won 0-300).
For the second year in a row we were able to demonstrate our hospitality by letting Toronto junior Jacob Freeman play for free (GNYBA student policy) and letting him walk off with the 0-2000 prize. We were thrilled he could join us. He may have to miss school to attend next November.
GNYBA Player of the Year was a tie: Glenn Robbins & Lloyd Arvedon Team Player of the Year was a tie: Michael Polowan & Adam Wildavsky Bob Factor Flight B Player of the Year: Stefano Merlo
Frequent Play Drawing
There were 179 players with under 2,000 points who played 5 sessions or more. The winner of the drawing for $100 in free entries for a future GNYBA regional was Christopher Moh.
The Big Apple Winter Regional has concluded along with the final results of our GNYBA Player of the Year rankings. Congratulations to Lloyd Arvedon and Glenn Robbins as tied 2019 winners. For team player of the year, we also have a tie for first: Michael Polowan and Adam Wildavsky. Stefano Merlo was the Flight B Player of the year (also a member of the District Grand National Teams Flight B team that reached the semi-finals at NABC)
Masterpoint winners galore, from the just-concluded Winter Regional
$100 winners are Wendy Wen from New York City, Matthew Gordon from Northport and Jacob Freeman from Toronto. Matt won the 0-300 race last December. Jacob won the 0-2,000 last year .
There were 179 players with under 2,000 points who played 5 sessions or more. The winner of the drawing for $100 in free entries for a future GNYBA regional was Christopher Moh
What an exciting regional so far! Let’s thank the tournament hospitality staff for all their efforts, awarding daily door prizes, hidden coffee vouchers, cash prizes, and candy bowls to all. I personally won none of those things except for the latter – but I will say the candy quality is top notch.
No tootsie rolls, jaw breakers, or other weak options here – you will find strong and invitational holdings: Butterfinger, fun-size Snickers (not the square minis, but the rectangular bars), Babe Ruth, Twix Left and Twix Right. Someone even told me they found Almond Joy! We went bowl-by-bowl, rummaging together, but could not confirm the rumor.
Cash Prizes Recap
Mid-Flight Pairs Matchpoints: $100 winning pair Gold Rush Pairs Day 2: $100 winning pair Straitified Open Pairs Day 3: $50 to flight A, B, and C winners Mid-Flight Swiss Teams: $120 winning team Bracketed Swiss Day 5: $120 to bottom bracket winning team
Door Prizes: Twice-daily gift cards for Starbucks and Amazon
Frequent Player Drawing: Players with 0-2000 mps who play 5 sessions or more at the Hilton to be entered into the drawing: $100 free entry to future NYC regionals.
Tournament masterpoint races: 0-300, 300-750, and 750-2000 players who earn the most points at this regional will win cash prizes at the end of the five days
Any section top: stop by the hospitality desk for $3 off your next entry
Winners and Photos
Jim Giblette, winners of the Gold Rush cash prizeTop Bracket Swiss Teams winners: Uday Uvatury, Nancy Katz, Migry Zur, Christal HennerMid-Flight Swiss $120 cash prize winners: Joan Leiberman, Stephanie Weisberg, and brothers Gary and Bob RussellTrustcott BAM Winners: Adam Wildavsky, Jared Lillienstein, Michael Polowan, Jan Jansma
NOABC Victories
Katherine Todd (0-5000 Teams Champion)
Zia Mahmood
(Open KO semifinals)
Joe Grue
(Open Pairs 4th)
Team Liebhaber
(0-1500 Teams semifinals)
GNYBA League Nov 2020
Season One Results Team New England
Better Than Ok On A Good Day
Team Sam
