2014 May Sectional Results

Monday

EventField Strength (MP)Tables
Monday Morning Open Pairs2666163730
Monday Morning 749er Pairs33423710
Monday Morning 199er Pairs74507
Monday Afternoon Open IMP Pairs3773235016
Monday Afternoon 749er Pairs41536610
Monday Afternoon Swiss Teams176195720

Not sure what IMP Pairs is? Review the explanation from last year.

Sunday

EventField Strength (MP)Tables
AX Swiss Teams4306318419 × 2
BCD Swiss Teams77749815 × 2

Saturday

EventField Strength (MP)Tables
Saturday Morning Open Pairs2769164926
Saturday Morning 749er Pairs30922812
Saturday Morning 199er Pairs955810
Saturday Afternoon Open Pairs3415232522
Saturday Afternoon 749er Pairs2091546
Saturday Afternoon 199er Pairs*53285
Saturday Compact KO Teams359626299
Saturday Afternoon Swiss Teams24379689

*Revised Sunday at 7 pm with score corrections on boards 8, 13, and 14.

Total table count: 260   (Sat: 99, Sun: 68, Mon: 93)

397 ACBL players attended, 323 taking home masterpoints, with 1062.46 total masterpoints awarded. Jon Wright was the overall masterpoint winner, earning 17.73 MP. See the ACBL website results for a summary of the winners in each event and the full list of masterpoint winners. Tournament Flyer. TourneyTRAX listing.

Most of you were from local units: La Jolla (68), San Diego (183), Coronado Chula-Vista (21), North San Diego (49), and North Inland (39). But some came from further: Dana Harbour (1), Saddleback (4), the greater Los Angeles region (8), Palm Springs (7), Inland Valley (1), Visalia (1), Monterey (1), Palo Alto (1), Reno (1), Salt Lake (2), Arizona (3), Florida (1), Washington D.C. (1), Calgary (1), and Unknown (4).

Jean Molnar was the Director-in-Charge. She was assisted by Arleen Harvey, Brandon Sheumaker (Saturday only) and Paul Darin (Saturday only). They all did a very professional job.

This was a fairly big La Jolla Unit sectional, though smaller than last year’s fantastic 287 table three day May Sectional and the four day 283½ table May 2009 sectional. Financial recap.

Acknowledgments

Charlotte Blum and Lynne Anderson headed up the hospitality on Saturday and Monday respectively. Bill Grant picked up the pizza on Sunday. Matthew Kidd brought the Saturday morning donuts, Sunday morning bagels, and Monday afternoon ice cream. Charlotte purchased the snacks from Costco. Our caddies Allison Ogul and Brian Cushman both worked very hard all three days making coffee, preparing hospitality, cleaning up, caddying boards, and setting up and tearing down our extra room for Saturday. Lynne Anderson’s granddaughter, Krista helped with hospitality on Monday.

Charlotte also organized hospitality contributions from other bridge players and provided two casseroles and a cake herself. Freda Anderson, Lesley Davis, Gail Dunham, Debbie Hedenberg, Hilary Jacobson, Steve Johnson, Sam and Yoko Jordan, and Dorinda Lindvall all brought items. Ron and Mary Huffaker brought some of their great lemons.

Wirt Gilliam, the owner of Adventures in Bridge, was a good host in many ways that went beyond his contractual obligations with the unit.

Neal Chua helped me pack all the rental chairs in my car. 50 folding chairs in a hatchback!

The Iron Butt Awards

The following 24 players receive the iron butt award for playing in all six sessions. Collectively they represent 14% of the total table count.

Be Social

If you would like to see your picture appear when the mouse cursor is held over your name in the results as in the screenshot below, e-mail your picture and ACBL player number to me at webmaster@lajollabridge.com. Note: cut-and-paste may not work for this e-mail address due to spam prevention measures.

ACBLmerge tooltip illustration showing player's face and number of masterpoints

The field strength numbers are computed as the arithmetic and geometric means respectively of the masterpoint holdings for all ACBL members in a field.

ACBLmerge Recap Hyperlink Illustration ACBLmerge Copy-and-Paste Aid Illustration

I added 11 new faces at this tournament and updated 3 existing faces. Your new or updated picture will also appear on Bridge Results.

Did you know your recap sheet is just a click away? Click on your pair number and wait a couple of seconds for the popup window to appear. Want to copy hands more conveniently? Click on the C button below the double dummy results on a hand to bring up the cut-and-paste aid.

Slow Play Penalties Vigorously Enforced

slow bridge player depicted as snail about to set a world record for slowness

Tournament directors were instructed to vigorously enforce slow play penalties and players were made aware of the policy through a series of three slides (PDF icon, Microsoft PowerPoint icon) posted at each location where directors collected entries and at the hospitality location.

Penalties are the only thing that affects the behavior of slow players. Warnings, cajoling, shaming, badgering, etc have all been tried and proven ineffective. Just ask any director. The standard penalty for the first offense is 1/8 of a board, roughly a decrease of 0.5% in the overall session score, doubling for each subsequent penalty in the session. I think starting at 1/4 of a board would be an improvement.

Slow play penalties are not intended to penalize players who face the occasional genuinely difficult bidding or play situation but rather those pairs who are slow nearly every round. You know the type. The uncontested auction begins 1♣ 1♠ and suddenly opener goes into the tank. No auction ever seems routine with such pairs even though they are a well established partnership where each player has a couple of thousand masterpoints. Or as a defender you quickly realize declarer’s only reasonably line of play is to try for a 3-3 break in one suit with a finesse in another as a fallback option. But by time declarer reaches this conclusion, the hand has taken ten minutes to play. Regarding slow players, Howard Bigot-Johnson (and I) ask, “What can they be thinking about?

Slow players may think their behavior doesn’t cause much harm because most players, except the poor pair following them, are only delayed and annoyed during one round. But as with similar behavior such as pollution, squeegee men, and abuse of political office where the harm is diffused over many people, we must still consider the aggregate impact of the behavior. The slow players are greedy, thieves of time, the opponent’s time, in a timed game where each partnership is entitled to half the time on the round on average. And the impact extends beyond fairness. Here is long time Vancouver regional tournament manager Bruce McIntyre quoted in Bigot-Johnson’s article Slow Bridge Players: The Biggest Irritant of All:

“The biggest irritant in duplicate bridge, claimed a survey not too long ago, is not table rudeness, or complicated systems, or even anything to do with smoking…it is slow play. Many experienced local players who used to play frequently are seldom seen at clubs these days. Is it because they play rubber at home? Because they’ve lost interest? Because they feel no need to beat inferiors? Because they’ve lost touch with the latest conventions? No. It is because they haven’t the patience to play club bridge anymore, because it’s too damn slow. As a result, many club games are getting smaller. Once you lose the top end of your player base, the remaining members don’t attend with anywhere near the frequency of the bridge-crazy addicts, and attendance goes slowly down. You can point to a lot of reasons why attendance is off, but the number-one turn off is following a pair who are slow every round, and (if you are a sitting pair) waiting for the boards as always from the slowcoaches next door to be completed and handed over!”

Better to lose a few incorrigible slow players than the game itself.

Miscellaneous

Sailboat guided by a bridge compass

Most of my landscape photos from the slideshow at the tournament can also be found on my Panoramio account where they eventually make their way into Google Earth and Google Maps (view big 1200 × 900 slideshow or smaller 800 × 600 slideshow). I showed photos taken since last year’s May sectional. Many pictures are from Utah, including four glorious days hiking in Escalante in the fall during the government shutdown. Many others are from local hikes taken with John Strauch and the folks that he has been hiking with for years, decades in some cases.

Table tallying notes: Monday afternoon had two half tables. I rounded the 749er Pairs down and Open IMP Pairs up.

Matthew Kidd
Unit President