Greater New York Bridge Association

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).