Flight B Live Results

Posted on February 25, 2024 by Lee Lin

Results after lunch.

final results and bracket:

Jonas-Silver (top seed bye)

Kuang vs Poon (seed 2)

Tetzlaff vs Sigward (3rd seed)

Yang vs Mandell (4th seed)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Lipkin Leads Championship Flight Opening Round

Posted on February 24, 2024 by Lee Lin

Six teams entered the GNT Championship Flight opening round today to play 50 boards in a round robin. They played 10 rounds of 5 boards each, which allows for more match awards and more flexibility or the 5-handed and 6-handed teams. That’s different from the way Flight A operated 3 weeks ago, where we played 8 segments but treated the day as 4 longer 12-board matches.

The defending champions last year consisting of Mike Lipkin, Mustafa Cem Tokay, Erez Hendelman, and David Gurvich finished in the lead with 130.57 Victory Points. Technically, this team is a repeat of last year’s championship flight winners and qualify for favorable seeding. However, it was irrelevant due to the round robin format and clearly not necessary. They won 6 out of the 10 matches.

Close behind was Team Eisenstein with 126.07 Victory Points, who actually won more matches with 7 out of 10 wins (but apparently fewer landslide wins). First seed Lipkin chose to play against Team Baseggio in the semi-finals tomorrow, leaving Team Eisenstein to play Team Miniter.

Salute to the Three-Flight Players

It is especially rare to find players who are willing to play in three different flights of GNT in the same year. Four years ago we had a list of 10 such players. This year, it seems to only be two: Kari Tetzlaff and Jack Boge.

Note that one must be in the 0-2500 range to even pull this off; with our careful scheduling, one can only play Champ-A-B or Champ-B-C, because A and C are held on the same day, disallowing A-B-C. There were also some concerns about playing Championship and B in the same year. If a team plays in the opening round and survives until the 2nd day, then the conditions require that they continue playing Championship and abandon any Flight B ambitions.

Posted in Events, Results | Tagged , | Leave a comment

WOW: The GNYBA Bulletin from 1984

Posted on February 23, 2024 by Lee Lin

In the middle of all the GNT excitement, we have uncovered an absolute treasure from 40 years ago thanks to Adam Wildavsky. Decades ago, the GNYBA published a regular bulletin and we have our hands on the November 1984 copy.

What was going on then? Jeff Bayone was then owner and manager of the Manhattan Bridge Club, joining in his first year on the board. The club qualifier stage of the GNT Flight B was beginning — back then you had club qualifiers just like with NAPs. There was no fourth Flight C GNT, and not even a third flight. It was just Open and B (0-500 at that time). Also on the GNYBA board was Margie Gwozdzinsky, of Countess Cup fame, and treasurer Aileen Osofsky, former chair of the ACBL Goodwill Committee.

The GNYBA Winter Regional (Renamed Edgar Kaplan Regional Later)

Surprise, our regional was still right around the December holidays, only back then it was part of a vast schedule of many sectionals and regionals from surrounding units and districts (GNYBA, NSBA, NJBL, WCBA, and D3 Tri-State). It would appear Unit 155 and Unit 242, even back then, kept our regionals separate despite all begin part of District 24.

A few interesting things to note. Regionals used to have a smoking and non-smoking section?? Does that mean East West pairs would have to rotate through a lot of North-South smokers, or was there literally a field of all smokers and a field of non smokers? For teams, is there a smoking bracket and non-smoking bracket? All intriguing questions. If anyone knows or has any other copies of the old GNYBA bulletin, please email them to us!

Apparently back then a 3-day regional at the Sheraton was profitable and drew tons of tables (or so I hear). It also seems the tournament schedule was MUCH more heavily focused on team events. You have a KO lasting Fri-Sun. You have 0-750 Swiss on Saturday and Sunday. Open Swiss Sunday, even consolation evening Swiss paying half red half black on Sunday, and Speedball swiss at 11:30pm Saturday?!? Was this all before the Goldman Pairs existed?

I see the tournament schedule was similarly confusing to newer players even back then, so I feel less bad about how crazy and intimidating our flyers still are today…

There was previously a club called Bridge and Games, not the renamed Cavendish that got us through Covid, but one run by Brian Glubok even further east than the old and new Honors. The teaching staff included Alan Miller, Augie Boehm, and quite a lot of familiar names.

We will dive more into the old Post Mortem’s in the coming weeks, but I very much hope to collect a few more issues. Please send them along to your favorite board member and they will pass it to us.

Posted in Bridge Thoughts | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

GNT Flight B Seeding Problem

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Lee Lin

We have an interesting first world problem. There are a lot of teams signed up for GNT Flight B this year in District 24. In fact, it is popular enough that the every eligible member of our District GNT Committee is playing (those with fewer than 2500 Masterpoints). The more senior members of our GNT Committee are not in a good position to seed the teams. Also, Flight B is likely to use the classic “two groups” method of splitting the field, which we used in Flight A and Flight C.

Masterpoints to the Rescue?

The simplest solution is to seed based on Masterpoints, which everyone knows is not great, but at least is objective and should draw the least amount of process complaints. At least doing things this way, it is no worse than randomly seeding, and should be deterministic.

Straight Swiss?

Another simple method that should draw no procedural complaints: forget trying to use a round robin and forget seeding. The opening round at the national finals is a swiss, with all the randomness that comes with matching opponents by cumulative Victory Points with no playbacks. You might pull a swiss gambit, you might get an unlucky run of opponents, you might chance upon the right few crucial blitzes to pull ahead. The only guarantee is that it is slightly unfair for everyone — you won’t face every team in your group.

Defending Champions – Team Goodspeed

Regardless of seeding method, Team Goodspeed qualifies under our definition of defending champions from the prior year (one of the top 2 teams in the District finals with a majority of identical team members). With captain Celia Verrier, Carole Pasquarelli, and Joann Goodspeed as the three returning members (Lore Monnig is unable to attend Toronto this year), this team will receive favorable seeding, a sufficiently vague definition that hopefully everyone trusts the committee will be able to honor in law and spirit.

Fun fact, Team Jonas-Silver narrowly misses the other defending champion favorable seeding benefit. They would have qualified had it not been for two unrelated, personal and last minute calamities that required a 15-minutes-before-game-time reconfiguration in May 2023. With only two members of last year’s team returning, they will be seeded along with the rest of us.

Seeding Ourselves?

The District 25 folks, aka New England, have an interesting way to seed. The captains all seed themselves. Meaning, each captain stack ranks every other team (no ties allowed), omitting their own team, and submits it to the director in charge. The director aggregates the rankings weighing everyone’s opinion equally and comes up with a total ordering.

Everyone’s first objection is the rankings from some captains might not be accurate. In fact, you might go step one further and ponder whether there is some advantage to ranking a strong team low or a weak team high. However, if there is some obvious way to benefit from such a method, with or without collusion, it’s not obvious how to truly game it. Plus, if discovered it could be considered an interesting ethical violation.

Forming a Special Committee

Most likely we will need to invite a few key players who knows a majority of the Flight B field and ask them to be part of a seeding committee. They will then submit their groupings to the director who will have a final ruling on what is most appropriate. Ideally seeding has minimal impact, but it can create relatively large consequences for the KO phase, not just the quarterfinals but all subsequent rounds. Do we have any takers, not planning to play, that will volunteer for this glorious task?

Posted in Bridge Thoughts, Events | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Smirnov Advances to GNT-C Semi Finals

Posted on February 18, 2024 by Lee Lin

The 2nd KO of the KO-packed GNT season has completed with Smirnov prevailing to the semi-finals with a 65-22 halftime score and finishing the match with a final score of 114-34.

First off, congratulations to the 5th place team consisting of Jim Diederich, Thierry Bonnet, Barbara Marsh, and Rita Bar-Or. Each player will receive 6.67 Masterpoints, half gold half red, which are crucial pigments needed to eventually earn the rank of Life Master. The points will also count toward this year’s Mini McKenney races, but not the Ace of Clubs or Ace of Virtual Clubs (because even though the entire event took place at Honors, this is a District event).

Next up, Team Smirnov will play against Team Li, with quite a lot on the line. Any team that advances to the finals will receive an invitation to represent New York City and Long Island in the national finals in Toronto this July. It will be the winner of Smirnov vs Li in addition to the other side of the Flight C bracket, consisting now of Team Lupoff, Team Oratofsky, and Team Moscow.

Will There Be A 3rd and 4th Place?

Also, in one final twist, it is possible the two semi-final losing teams will need to play a match or merge into one team to determine the 1st alternates for Toronto. Why might a team not go to Toronto? Some people simply can’t take 5 days off to play bridge. Others might have no interest in going to the national finals, but wanted to play in a fun and friendly District wide event to earn gold points. Whatever the reason, should any of the eventual two winners opt not to attend, we need a clear 1st alternate team.

This occurred last year when Team Verrier and Team Latta advanced to the finals of Flight B, but Latta also reached the finals of Flight C. After Team Latta opted to go to nationals in Flight C, the original 3rd and 4th place teams, Petsch and Schwartz, merged into one team.

Posted in Events, Results | Tagged , | 1 Comment

All GNT KO Matches Scheduled

Posted on February 12, 2024 by Lee Lin

Let’s give all the advancing captains in Flight A and C a huge round of applause. Every first round KO match seems to be scheduled, most of them in February!

Flight A Semi Finals

First, the early bird award goes to Dziekanski vs Jonas-Silver, the Flight A wild card match. Because we had 10 teams in the opening round of Flight A, we split the field into two groups of five, one led by defending champion Trabulus and the other led by defending finalist Chang. Each group advanced the top two teams, and the 3rd place team from only one of the brackets would advance as the wildcard 5th team. Team Jonas-Silver narrowly beat Boge by less than a Victory Point (39.95 vs 39.31), allowing the wild card to play a heads up wildcard KO for a chance at the semi finals.

They quickly scheduled and played their 48 board match this week with Dziekanski, prevailing with a final segment comeback: down by 7 IMPs with 12 boards to go but then pulling it together for +8 IMPs to end the match 50-42). Not advancing is Maya Jonas-Silver, Jack Latta, David Yoon, and Randi Edelman, who win 13.33 gold points each and the official 5th place spot in this year’s District 24 Flight A.

Team Dziekanski will play Team Chang in a 48 board match on Wed night 2/28 and Friday night 3/1.

On the other side of the bracket, free from any wild card match, Team Ekinci will play Team Trabulus over 48 boards on March 7th in a straight afternoon and evening same day match (a good simulation of the daily 52 board KOs during the GNTs at NABC). EDIT: This match is not yet 100% confirmed, they might still try to do it over 2 days, stay tuned.

Will we see a rematch of Trabulus vs Chang this year in the finals, or will Ekinci or Dziekanski push through? Teams that reach the finals will receive 30 gold points and a blue ribbon qualifier for the Mini Blue or Blue Ribbon Pairs at nationals.

Flight C Quarter Finals

We already wrote about the Flight C Trophy Wars, or Battle of the Countess vs Inter-Club Cups. Oratofsky vs Moscow will take place on 2/29, Thursday night at Honors.

The other match is Team Smirnov vs Team Diederich, scheduled for Sunday, 2/18 for 30 boards. Captain James Diederich took first overall during the Gellas Newcomer Pairs event held at the Midtown Hilton in October 2022. Teammate Thierry Bonnet that year also won the Helen Shanbrom Ace of Clubs masterpoint race in District 24. That year both face-to-face and online black counted towards the same Masterpoints race, the final year prior to the Ace of Virtual Clubs separation in 2023.

Opposing captain Ivan Smirnov was the winner of the GNYBA silver point Rising Stars cup in June 2023 with a big 69% afternoon session to beat fellow Flight C quarterfinalists Oratofsky and Soloman. Ivan’s teammates Stephanie Chamberlain and Sheri Elowsky also have their own GNYBA tournament victory: they won the overall 1st place award during the final Saturday Gold Rush of the Astoria Regional, which won pure gold points and an invitation to the Red Ribbon Pairs in Toronto NABCs.

The winner of this match faces off against Opening Round group winners Team Li, who received a bye along with Team Rockoff during the quarterfinal KO round.

Paying KO Round Card Fees

New this year, we are piloting accepting credit card payments for the KO round. You will no longer need to pay the hosting club, which was previously a messy process where teams give cash to the club director, who may or may not know the correct amount to charge you.

Posted in Results | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

GNT Knock Outs: Trophy Wars

Posted on February 10, 2024 by Lee Lin

We’ve entered the GNT phase that everyone both loves and hates: the KO rounds.

For those in Flight C playing GNTs for the first time, congratulations. You are guaranteed to win a big chunk of gold and red points, but apologies if you thought it was all over in one day! The KOs have been in the conditions every year for an eternity, but no one reads it until their team qualifies past day one.

Trophy Wars: Rising Stars Cup versus Interclub Cup

One anticipated KO match in Flight C is Team Oratofsky vs. Team Moscow (the winner will face off against Team Rockoff). Paul Oratofsky and Steve Soloman entered the NYC tournament scene during the GNYBA June Sectional scoring silver points in both sessions of the Countess Cup, then followed up with an impressing back-to-back first overall finish in both morning and afternoon sessions of the Rising Stars Cup during the Astoria Regional.

Team captain John Moscow has two cups on display: the Interclub Season Winning Team and the Interclub Season Winning Pair, both found in the trophy case at the Harvard Club of New York. Their team consists of four regular players from the Interclub Bridge League, including Laszlo Seress, who represented our District in spring 2021 for NAP Flight C.

This match will take place on leap year day, February 29th, Thursday 6pm at Honors with former GNT Flight C national champion Sam Kuang officiating as table director.

Past Victors from District 24?

Sam is the first player in D24 to ever win the GNT-C national finals in 2014, followed by Lucy Zhang in 2018. Interestingly, they were playing for D21 and D23 respectively at the time of their victory. You have to fast forward to 2021 when the team captained by Henrui Xing won with an all D24 team, followed by last year’s 1st and 2nd place victories of Team Boge and Team Mandel.

GNT-A: Dziekanski vs Jonas-Silver

The final 24 boards of the match versus Team Dziekanski and Team Jonas-Silver takes place today, Feb 10th, at Honors. After the first two segments, the score was 28-11 followed by 47-31 with Dziekanski in the lead by about slightly more than one game swing. That’s a fairly thin margin at the halfway point of a 48-board match, so anything can happen as they enter segments three and four.

The winner of the match will play against Mini Spingold veterans on Team Chang in the semi-final KO to determine who gets 20 gold versus 30 gold and an invitation to the Blue Ribbon Pairs during the Fall NABCs, as well as advancement to the District final KO against the winner of the Trabulus and Ekinci match.

Posted in Events, Results | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

GNT Flight C: Rockoff and Li Take Opening Round

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Lee Lin

The 12 Flight C teams played 50 boards each today in two groups of 6 teams. In group A, the leaders are Music Li, Yuchen Xu, Joshua Allen, and Lee Silberman. Also surviving to the KO round are Team Oratofsky and Team Diederich.


Team Rockoff after learning they are the Flight C bracket winners

In Flight C group B, pictured above are the bracket winners Jesse Rockoff, Linda Brady, Olga Stein, and Dylan Lupo. Incredibly, this was their first time playing a team game or using IMP scoring; they signed up thanks to encouragement from their Supervised Play instructor and prior D24 GNT Coordinator Amy Rhodes.. The other survivors are Team Smirnov and Team Moscow.

Per our GNT conditions, now the 6 teams enter a Quarterfinals. Group leads Rockoff and Li receive byes in the first KO round. However, Rockoff will play the winner of Oratofsky vs Moscow while Li will play the winner of Smirnov vs Diederich. All players who have survived this far will receive at least 6.67 gold and red points, but could be upgraded to as high as 20 points and an invitation to the Red Ribbon Pairs and the McNab Grand National Teams during the Toronto NABCs this July.

For raw results, check the GNT update post.

GNT Flight A: Trabulus and Chang Defend

In Flight A, the two defending finalists from last year have repeated their strong performance from the prior year. Norman Trabulus, Joseph Byrnes, Dina Schechter, David Joseph, Charles Bilich, and Michael Krevor, aka the Defending Champs, ended the day with the most Victory Points in the field. In the other Group, Spingolders Jacqueline Chang, Dave Marker, Jordan Lampe, Christopher Moh, Leon Yu, and Zhuo Wang won 4 out of 4 matches for 55.58 Victory Points.

Honorable mention to Team Dziekanski for also winning all 4 matches. The other two surviving teams are Team Ekinci and Team Jonas-Silver.

All surviving teams at this point will receive at least 13.33 gold points, which may be upgraded to as high as 40 gold points, an invitation to the Blue Ribbon Pairs , and the Goldman Grand National Teams during the Toronto NABCs in July.

For raw results, check the GNT update post.

Posted in Events, Results | Tagged | Leave a comment

GNT Live Updates 2024-02-04

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Lee Lin

Flight A Opening Round Results:

Group A:
Trabulus
Dziekanski
Jonas-Silver

Group B:
Chang
Ekinci



finals flight C both groups

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Flight C Reaches 12 Teams, Conditions Explained

Posted on February 1, 2024 by Lee Lin

Just after celebrating the party in GNT Flight A, Flight C has also reached pre-pandemic levels with 12 teams. Filling a teams event with 48 players in our District, all non life masters with under 500 Masterpoints, is incredible. A huge thanks to all the instructors, mentors, and supervisors who have encouraged our up-and-coming players to participate.

After consulting with ACBL, our Director-in-Charge, and the GNT Committee, we have expanded and clarified several elements of the conditions of contest.

Why Not a Round Robin or Swiss for 12 Teams?

We want the opening round to be as fair as possible and eliminate any reliance on seeding teams. However, it’s not practical for all 12 teams to play each other. You would need 11 rounds and each round would be too short. If we run a swiss, then not all teams face each other, creating unfairness. You might avoid playing against the strongest team or miss a chance to play the weakest team.

The “Two Groups” Round Robin Method

With 12 teams, we can split the teams into two equally strong groups, Group A and Group B. Then, the 6 teams in each group can play a relatively long match against each of the other teams in your group (sneaking in a lunch break somewhere). At the end of the day, the top half of each group based on Victory Points survive to the quarterfinals.

Any Changes to the KO Phase?

New this year, as required by ACBL, is the option for the 2nd place team in the semifinals to opt-in and become an opponent choice for the top seeded team. This occurs when say GNT Flight A has 9 teams in a round robin and 4 survive based on Victory Points. Team 1 usually chooses from Teams 3 and 4 as their semi-final opponent. However, sometimes due to luck and randomness, Team 3 and Team 4 might actually be more scary than Teams 1 and 2. In this case, Team 2 can decide to opt-in and become a selection, which under our premise would be a wise choice for Team 1.

How Do you do a Quarter Finals with 6 Teams?

The top teams in Group A and B, call them A1 and B1, receive a bye. Then A2 plays B3 while B2 plays A3 to advance to the semi-finals. In the semi, A1 plays the B2 vs A3 winner while B1 plays the A2 vs B3 winner.

The theory is, after the opening round, the two strongest teams are either A1 and B1, or they could have both been in the same original group, A1 and A2, or B1 and B2. This style of bracketing ensures that for all three such cases, the two strongest teams face of in the finals. Of course, in practice there’s enough randomness that all of this theorizing is quite silly!

Who Forms The Two Groups?

The Director will announce the groups as the event starts. Sometimes, a seeding committee consisting of the GNT Committee and other unbiased volunteers will do their best to take into account defending champions, tournament experience, past performance, Masterpoints, and ribbon qualifiers to balance the groups as best as possible. Seeding committee members recuse themselves when they are also participants in the same flight.

Why Not Cut Down to 4 Immediately?

The Masterpoints awards grant overalls to all teams advancing to KO Phase as long as the Opening Round cuts 50% or more of the field. Therefore, the event will award a big chunk of gold and red points to more teams by advancing 6 out of 12. It also gives an incentive to do as well in the Opening Round because of the valuable byes in the quarter finals.

Posted in Bridge Thoughts, Events | Tagged , | 2 Comments