Yesterday we gave an extreme example missing Thanksgiving and catching all 11 days of the NABC on a tight budget of $1600 (required Airbnb or a hostel). For the more normal among us, you probably don’t need all 11 days. Even 12 sessions squeezed in to 6 days should be plenty.
Many of the popular NABC+ events begin at 1pm on Tuesday, Dec 3rd. Anyone playing the Blue Ribbon, Mini-Blue, Whitehead Women’s Pairs, and 0-10000 IMP Pairs needs to fly Monday night or Tuesday morning. Unfortunately, airfare is still slightly inflated from the Thanksgiving crowd.
Interestingly, for the B/C Players, there are almost no events of interest other than the Mini-Blue and your usual daily Gold Rush Pairs / Open Pairs. One Knockout series begins Tuesday afternoon and commits you to Wed (a bad idea).
Delay your arrival by one day and you save $100 on airfare (plus a hotel night). If you like team games, on Wed Dec 4th, there is something for everyone: Gold Rush Swiss teams, Bracketed B Swiss teams, and A/X Swiss, all 2-session. However, there is only FAST Open Pairs and Open Pairs – there is no Gold Rush Pairs that day.
Suppose you suddenly decided to attend and play all 11 days of the San Francisco NABC, forgoing any prior Thanksgiving plans. You could make the trip, including travel and lodging, for about $1600. Of course, playing 22 sessions would rack up another $400+ of card fees.
First, you would need to fly early on Thanksgiving Day to make the first session on 11/28 at 1PM – the Educational Fund Pairs or Swiss Teams, single session. If you happen to be 0-5 Masterpoints but crazy enough to go to NABC, entry fees are free on 11/29. I imagine this is strictly for spouses or locals who want to tiptoe into the game.
For lodging, SOMA and Union Square are notoriously expensive hotel districts. The Marriott host hotel will set you back $3000 for 10 nights. You can cut corners staying closer to the airport, but the daily commute among thousands of Silicon Valley tech workers won’t be fun.
You could take your chances with Airbnb – just make sure you read the fine print. Some of these are hostels with shared bathrooms, or even shared rooms! For what it’s worth, most Airbnb guests are nice and leave 5-star reviews; anything under 4.00 is a huge red flag.
And for those who want a piece of the NABC action without any travel, consider the Online Robot Individual. For only $50, you play 72 boards over 3 days, with a field of over one thousand players. It is stratified, you are placed into your own section with section awards, and you could win an NABC title!
Club Qualification is no longer required for any flights
For the past two years, players in Flight C required club qualification. The goals were two-fold. Field protection in the Opening Round, and more importantly, advertisement and encouragement to attract more teams. Many 0-500 might be intimated by the sheer name “Grand National Teams,” but strong performance at the qualifier would both act as a confidence boost and early deadline to form teams.
For this year, eligible teams of 4, 5, or 6 players simply show up to the Opening Round. The discussion of the pros and cons will wait for another day.
Replacement Teams for NABC Rules Update
In flights B and C, two teams are eligible to attend NABC as long as 8 or more teams participate in the Opening Round of the District Finals. Previously, if the 2nd place team elects not to go to NABC, the District would only send the 1st place team.
The updated conditions will allow the semi-finalist teams to play a head-to-head match to determine the substitute team. If neither semi-finalist team elects to go, or they are unable schedule a match, the district has discretion to form a replacement team.
ACBL recently launched the TryBridge campaign, with a goal to introduce the game to new players of all ages and demographics. Bridge forums everywhere have debated recruitment from all angles, but I’m always intrigued with the comparison to chess.
Why is that the wrong comparison?
The starting position in chess is the same in every game, and all players have access to the same information at all times
Bridge and poker involve both skill and luck – there is enough luck to give weaker players a chance on any given hand, or even a session of 24 hands. How a player emotionally handles these frequent “bad beats” is part of the skill of the game! Bridge is about learning the correct percentage plays, and not dwelling on any particular result.
Bridge requires a minimum of 4 players, and unfortunately multiplayer games tend to reveal the toxic side of personalities
There aren’t many people to blame when you lose a game of chess. However, if you’ve ever tried bughouse, a variant of chess with 2 boards and 4 players, the old joke is there are at least 3 other people you can blame for the loss.
I’ve been very fortunate to start off early with excellent, supportive bridge mentors. I often cringe when I see partnerships yelling at each other following some bidding or defensive blunder – and all too often both of them are wrong! And remember, we’re talking about fully grown, mature adults…
Chess has physical pieces. Bridge uses a deck of cards.
I first learned chess in kindergarten because of sibling rivalry. My older brother joined the after-school chess club for 4th and 5th graders held in the basement of our elementary school in Cape May Court House, NJ. The board and pieces looked appealing and intriguing, so I wanted to learn! Even in our small town, about a dozen kids came to chess club every week and we had a great time, blissfully unaware of how bad we were.
Bridge came much later. It was yet another card game, more complex than hearts and spades, AND you sit out 25% of the time! Luckily, a teacher at Math Camp patiently taught a group of us one summer in Seattle.
At the end of the 4 weeks, he took us to a local bridge club, my first duplicate game. To this day I have no idea how a huge pack of novice teenagers survived 24 boards. One kid threw the “STOP” card mid-hand and ran off for a bathroom break. Tons of fun, but I sincerely hope our teacher called ahead of time to warn the directors!
For those scrambling last minute plans (possibly your partner’s fault), did you know there is an ACBL Online Partnership desk? Dozens of players are waiting online to be contacted for partners and teammates, and the online partnership desk provides more information than the typical low tech bulletin board of index cards.
When searching through a perspective “bridge date”, you can see their preferred bidding system (ACOL, 2/1, Precision, Polish Club). You can see both the Masterpoints they have AND the exactly color pigment breakdown, plus any Red, Blue, and Silver ribbon qualifiers. You also know the date they joined ACBL and their city, state, if you find that useful.
Last year for Honolulu, the online desk landed me a wonderful partner who lived in neighboring Long Island, and we continued to play together at the NYC Regional this year!
Today is the last free practice ACBL tournament before the Fall 2019 NABC Robot Individual tournament. Log in and go to ACBL World to find it, NOT Robot world, even though both worlds are full of robots.
Go to ACBL World from the BBO main page, then find the only tournament that says “Free” on the entry. You will need a BBO account linked with an active ACBL number to play.
Normally you need to pay $1 per day to rent an advanced bot on BBO, or $1.35 per day to play a 12 board tournament against advanced bots. They are stronger than the basic bots, which are only $1 per week to rent, or free when you challenge a friend. A few lucky and skillful winners in the practice tournament will earn a free entry to the Online Individual, a $40 value (or $34 if you are a repeat customer returning competitor).
According to the CEO of BridgeBase, basic bots perform better than about 90% of human players in the daily daylong tournaments, and advanced bots perform better than 97% of human players. Log in and give it a shot!
Team games are the easiest way to earn gold points and ribbon qualifiers at the upcoming Big Apple Winter Regional (Dec 26 – Dec 30 2019)
One of the most annoying drawbacks of team games is the lack of hand records. Perhaps that’s actually better for morale, but for those who love to post-mortem, you only have what you remember. Even at nationals, team games are usually shuffle-and-play, with a network of caddies to bring boards back and forth between your tables.
The Honors Swiss game is one of the few places to use pre-duplicated boards while regularly hosting over 20 tables of Swiss teams. The directors expend great effort to create multiple sets of boards and design a complex rotation to make it all work. At the end you receive hand records in print and online. Unfortunately, teams report match scores but not the results on each board. If there is an interesting hand, you only learn how you and your teammates played it, not the usual dozen results following a pairs game.
In IMP scoring, making the contract is the most important goal. You might not take the “safety play” in matchpoints, especially when an alternative is very likely to win overtricks.
Know of any other clubs with team games that provide hand-records? The only other club where I have seen pre-duplicated Swiss teams on a regular basis is the Yotsuya Bridge Center in Tokyo, Japan.
ACBL has the standard Mini McKenney and Ace of Clubs masterpoint races for each unit and district, with overall leaderboards for the entire continent of North America. It’s that time of year to check your standings in the Unit 155 Masterpoint Races.
Ace of Clubs counts the annual points won at any ACBL sanctioned physical club game (excludes online points). Mini-McKenney counts all ACBL sanctioned events, including tournaments. The $40 robot online individual hosted on BBO is an NABC event paying red and gold points, which DOES count, but not other BBO ACBL events.
Here in Greater New York, we have our own special race – the GNYBA Player of the Year Award. The bulk of the formula is tied to specific major events such as Goldman Pairs, NAP, GNT, and other tournaments deemed prestigious by tradition. Of course, luck plays a part in all events, but the award hopes to focus on consistent high scores playing in a strong field.
There are three categories with different formulas: individuals, individuals playing team games, and Flight B players. Here are the YTD standings:
First off, let’s admit we are all guilty of result stalking to some degree. When the club or Common Game results are delayed only half a day, people get antsy. What’s going on? Was there some massive scoring mistake? Did they realize we played the wrong boards? Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one refreshing your browser.
STaC week adds a second layer of result stalking – first you can see the club results, but there is a STaC delay before you can see the final silver point payouts with STaC bonus. The day after email is one way to find it, but if you did not play the event, you will need to find the Fall 2019, Unit 155 STaC results.
Even though it is currently Wednesday afternoon, we know results are delayed about 1-2 days. The only available result right now is the Monday afternoon session. Here are the results! Well done Marc and Cathy Nathan for their 69.35% game at Aces Bridge Club!
For those who didn’t dive into the inner mechanics of the STaC bonus formula, it is a simple calculation for open pairs, single-session public club events: 1.875 + 0.1875*Number_of_Tables. With 49.5 tables, it seems they round down.
1.875 + 0.1875 * 49 = 11.06 Silver
William Sigward and Jack Hartog won first place in strat B with a 69.05% game. However, 2nd place in A paid significantly more, which is 75% of the first prize (so you ignore any B-strat prize). Raymond Leon and Louis Haber took 2nd in B, with a solid 63.99% game. We can use their reward to deduce the number of B and C players among the 49.5 tables! However, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
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
