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.