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.