Greater New York Bridge Association

We previously discussed some reasons to play teams instead of pairs. Most team games will either be a Swiss or Bracketed Round Robin. A Swiss includes one large pool of teams and at each round, your opponent should have a similar Victory Point as yours. For the first round, your opponent is usually the team that lined up and bought an entry just before or after you. Then they put everyone on a massive, colorful scoreboard.

When it’s called Bracketed Swiss or Bracketed Teams, it almost always means Round Robin – directors place teams into brackets of 8 teams of similar masterpoints, and you play every team in the bracket once. The top 3 spots pay overalls – sometimes the directors need to make a few brackets 9 teams, and in those cases the top 4 spots pay.

Some believe Round Robin is more fair. In a Swiss, your reward for winning early matches is usually more difficult opponents, sometimes leading to some very interesting come-from-behind wins by round 7. In a Round Robin, your opponent is not a function of your current score – it’s usually a fully pre-determined schedule.

Which To Play?

Usually, you don’t have a choice. A tournament will have either Bracketed Round Robin or Swiss on any given day, but rarely both. The only exception is during NABC, say Dec 4th 2019, when you might have A/X/Y Swiss (open), Bracketed B Teams (0-3000), and Gold Rush Swiss. If either your masterpoints or skill do not meet certain requirements, then your only choice is to vote with your feet and attend the one you want.

There are other formats still found in the wild – notably Knockouts and Board-A-Match. The Grand National Teams and the new Soloway Knockout Teams combines two formats: Swiss to qualify a fraction of the field, then days of Knockouts to determine the ultimate winners. These formats have cool but weird nuances that we shall discuss another time.

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.

Today the District made two key updates to the 2020 Grand National Teams D24 conditions of contest.

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

Poker seems more similar to bridge than chess, and it shows with the overlap of high caliber players.

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!

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.

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!