Interesting tournament schedules

From time to time I like to check out tournament schedules from other parts of the country (and occasionally go to tournaments that aren't NABCs or in the Mid-Atlantic). Sometime last year I believe I wrote about how I admired the fact that a DC area tournament had a Board-a-match for flight A on Sunday of a sectional. Flight B was Swiss, which is reasonable. I still plan on attending that tournament some day, assuming they still have the Sunday BAM. Here are a few upcoming tournaments across the country that have interesting schedules.

 

This one in Halifax isn't so much an interesting schedule (although I am a fan of the 2-session pair game Saturday rather than single sessions) but take a look at the Friday evening schedule: No Midnight game. And they really thought it was important to specify that. Sure enough, they had a midnight game at the last Halifax sectional in November. They even had the finals of a proper 3 session KO starting at 11pm.

 

This Hawaii tournament is doing things backwards: 2 session Swiss on Saturday and 2 one session pair games Sunday, starting at 9am both days. Yuck. Meanwhile, this tournament in Toledo also has a 2 session Swiss Saturday but also has a 2 session Swiss on Sunday. Double yuck. At least they start at 11am. Needless to say, those are tournaments I will not be attending. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Charleston, WV sectional, where there are no team games. Sunday you get a 10:30 IMP pairs and a 3pm matchpoint pairs/BAM. If it was some place nicer than West Virginia, I might consider going out of my way to support this. All 3 of these are the first weekend in March.

 

The flyer for this tournament in Rochester, MN is lacking a bit. For 1:00 and 6:30 sessions, it says Pair/Team Games and that's all. What does that mean? I went back and looked at least year's results from this tournament and found that all those are pair games with computer-assigned teammates to score it as a BAM as well. And then I got confused because I thought masterpoint formulas for first in a 1 session event were the same regardless of whether it's matchpoint pairs, imp pairs, Swiss, or BAM, but apparently I am wrong. Winning in BAM somehow is worth more than winning a pair game of the same size. Well, technically a 28 table BAM is half as big as a 28 table pair game but first in the BAM paid 6.97 while first in the pair game paid the familiar 6.33. I like BAM but that is an injustice.

Gripes about tournament schedules

Organizing bridge tournament is hard. I get that and it's impossible to make everyone happy, but the schedule of relevant bridge tournaments for me coming up is just awful.

 

There never is a tournament in D7 that goes over President's Day weekend – maybe a small sectional somewhere not particularly close to me but that's all. Thus, I will be going to California for a tournament for that long weekend. It should be a nice change from the usual Georgia/South Carolina crowds. All holiday weekends should have a bridge tournament but the fact that there's no bridge on the MLK holiday is fine because it's just a couple weeks after the New Year's regional and the local Macon tournament is that Friday-Sunday.

 

Apparently the USBF is not sending a team to the FISU university bridge championships. This is the first time the USA will not be represented there. The excuse? It overlaps slightly with the Summer NABC (July 10-15 compared with July 12-22). I can sort of see that as a reason (even though I still think the USA should be represented there) but why would any world bridge competition be scheduled to conflict with an NABC, by far the biggest bridge event that is not technically international? Instead the USBF is sending entirely too many people (35) to the Youth Bridge Championships in China at the end of July. And the FISU competition is in France – wouldn't everyone rather go to France than China anyway? Or is it just me?

 

GNT scheduling irks me too. This happens every year – district 7 has the district final around the first of May so that it conflicts with final exams and graduation but it hasn't really affected me lately because I haven't had any school affiliation for the last 4 years. Since Stephen graduating with his Ph.D. is kind of a big deal, I guess I'm supposed to go to Ann Arbor for that, but it's the same weekend as the flight A GNT finals. I could play in the superflight GNT the following week but that is in Morganton which is kind of far and the odds of winning that are much much lower than in flight A.

 

I'm not even sure I'll be able to go to superflight GNT either because according to the school calendar, the final for my Wednesday evening class is supposed to be Saturday May 5 at 7pm. WTF? The syllabus says it's Wednesday May 2 at the normal class time, though, which makes sense. Why does the finals schedule have exams scheduled for Monday through Saturday but has nothing for Wednesday?

 

Then there's the NABC schedule with its starting times of 10:30 and 3:30 instead of 1 and 7:30. That's really going to cut into my sleeping time on ym vacation but I guess that's okay - the drinking can start 4 hours earlier but still likely not end much earlier.

 

Then there's the summer sectional in Atlanta, a Monday to Friday affair. What's wrong with the typical Wednesday to Sunday schedule so that us working people can still play 3 days without using any vacation time? I guess since July 4^th falls on a Wednesday and the NABC starts on the 12th… I dunno. It doesn't make sense and pisses me off.

 

On a lighter note, things are rolling toward planning the first Macon regional to take place just over a year from now. Since I might have some influence on the schedule for this, maybe I can get a BAM KO or a Sunday BAM instead of a Sunday Swiss (at least for flight A) on the schedule.

2012 in bridge has started out opposite of 2011

My first tournament of 2011 saw me win over 23 points at the Macon sectional. The first tournament this year yielded only a little more than 6 points, most of which was won in a pair game that I had estimated at 49% (but was actually 65%). Anyway, I got the 6.47 points that I needed for the next masterpoint milestone (2500 and Gold LM) by coming back from a miserable start to squeak into a tie for 9th in the Swiss.

It continually amazes me that Emory and I (and especially other top players who have played together for decades) still have so many disagreements about what certain bids mean. On the first deal of the tournament for me, I doubled a weak NT and LHO bid 2C. What is this? If you play strong notrumps, there isn't a great need for runouts so you would assume systems are on and this is stayman. Playing weak notrumps (good 11-14), it is common to have some sort of runout structure when they make a penalty double directly behind the 1NT opener. So, in addition to stayman, common ways to play 2C are that is is drop dead showing a 5 card suit or to show 4-4 in clubs and another suit. Strangely this pair with a decades-long partnership and 25000 mp combined did not know their agreement.

Another auction that apparently has no consensus of meaning is 4th suit by a passed hand. I had never had any discussion about what this means until yesterday. The specific auction was an uncontested P-1C; 1H-1S; 2D. I thought Emory probably thought it would be naturalish and forward going, something like a 2-5-4-2 10 count and was right. I can definitely see a good argument for it being an artificial 1 round force and playing Walsh-style responses to 1C, I can definitely see good arguments for 2D being drop dead (a minimum response with 4 hearts and 6+ diamonds).

Another one that came up was 2C-2NT; 3NT-4D. 2NT showed 5+ hearts with 2 of the top 3 honors. Should 4D be natural or a transfer? At the time I thought it should be a transfer (I am unlikely to bid over 3NT without extra heart length and if we play hearts, the big hand should be declarer) but in retrospect, it may make more sense to play it as natural and forcing. You lose right-siding a heart contract but gain the ability to explore for a diamond slam. Again, opinions were very divided even amongst us people who play together frequently.

I Heart Moysians

Last night was a comedy of errors all-around. It started with a -670 on the first board and didn't get much better the rest of the session. Emory and I each faced some tough defensive and bidding situations and guessed wrong almost every time but it's this declarer play problem that upset me the most. I found myself in 3SX after RHO opened 1H and lho hit 3S.

7xx
KQx
xx
AJ9xx

AKT9
x
Kxxxx
Q8x

The defense started with the HA lead, D to the A, DQ covered and ruffed. I Rabbi'ed on the club shift and now I should be home free. LHO is marked with 1-4 in the minors so could have 5 spades 3 hearts or 4 of each. With 4-4, he probably would not have doubled. However, if that's how the suits are splitting, there's an easy path to make - draw 2 rounds if trumps, then try to run clubs taking the marked finesse for the T.

But if LHO started with 5 spades (more likely given the budding), I need to draw only 1 round of trumps, then take 3 rounds of clubs and two hearts. LHO will have to follow to all the clubs and hearts so in the 3 card ending, I will have KT9 of spades in hand and lho will have QJx. Therefore, if I play a spade to my 9, he will be endlayed to lead into my KT tenace at trick 12. I wound up going down 1 by playing for lho to be 4-4-1-4 and rho 2-5-5-1. Not a smart plan given the double.

BAM BAM

This was our 9^th board in the BAM that we won with a 20.5 out of 24. I'm not sure I agree with any of the bidding but it was a double game swing in our favor. I disobeyed the rule about passing when the opponents have passed a forcing bid but this was quite the exception.
 

Dealer: S Vul: none North ♠ A543 ♥ 2 ♦ AK983 ♣ A64 West ♠ T982 ♥ AKQJT543 ♦ 2 ♣ - East ♠ J ♥ 987 ♦ T765 ♣ K9852 South ♠ KQ76 ♥ 6 ♦ QJ4 ♣ QJT73

 

East	South	West	North
-	1♣	X	1♠
Pass	Pass	4♥	X
Pass	Pass	Pass

 

There was nothing to the play in 4♥. After taking trick 1, the spade shift held me to 4 (8 heart tricks and 2 ruffs in dummy). I don't remember the auction at our teammates' table but they were able to find 4♠ and just make it. 4♥ is probably a better bid with my hand (west), at least on this deal. North will surely double but it would be hard to bid 4♠ over that since most people don't play negative doubles that high. At this point in the round, we were a perfect 9 for 9. If south has just raised to 2♠ like a normal person, north would have a clear 4♠ bid (if not more) and we would have had to bid 5♥ (and one of us surely would) to win the board. I like Board-a-match!

Won 3 events but overall it was a bad tournament

It's a fact that team games award about double the number of masterpoints as pair games. And among team games, bracketed knockouts award the most points. The exact numbers are that pair games pay about .43 masterpoints per person per session while team games pay .87 per person per session. A couple of weeks ago I did a little analysis of the masterpoints I won and found a huge disparity. I win significantly more in pair games than in team games: 3.46 per session in pair games but only 2.84 in Swiss and KO's. I certainly do consider myself better at matchpoints than imps but that much better? Eventually I decided to wait until getting back from Myrtle Beach to see if that would change things, as Sean and I would be in Knockouts all week supposedly with better teammates than we usually have. We played in 5 different knockouts (6 sessions) and won only one match. They were all fairly close matches and in the final match we lost by the handicap. While we didn't play any pair games, our only real success was in the board a match, where we won 10.6 points in 3 sessions of BAM. We finished with a win in the Sunday night BAM but the theme of terrible slam bidding continued.

Anyway, it seems that I got just barely enough masterpoints to keep 1st in the district in the 1000-2500 category with 533 total. That also was not quite enough to make me a Gold LM, so I guess I'll be passing that milestone at the Macon sectional next week.

It was a fun trip to Myrtle Beach despite having a terrible record in KOs. It felt like a bad week of bridge but we did win 3 events (2 BAMs and a compack KO) so I guess it wasn't all bad. I'll sort through my scorecards and find a good hand to write about when I get some time.