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2015 May Sectional Results

Monday

Event	Field Strength (MP)		Tables
Monday Morning Open Pairs	3397	2229	21
Monday Morning 749er Pairs	324	281	11
Monday Morning 199er Pairs	74	37	5
Monday Afternoon Open BAM Teams	4972	3991	8
Monday Afternoon 749er Pairs	325	271	10
Monday Afternoon 199er Pairs	187	40	4
Monday Afternoon Swiss Teams	2014	1112	13

Sunday

Event	Field Strength (MP)		Tables
AX Swiss Teams	4946	3962	16 × 2
BCD Swiss Teams	596	372	12 × 2

Saturday

Event	Field Strength (MP)		Tables
Saturday Morning Open Pairs	3262	1973	30
Saturday Morning 749er Pairs	300	233	11
Saturday Morning 199er Pairs	64	44	6
Saturday Afternoon Open Pairs	4194	2589	21
Saturday Afternoon 749er Pairs	353	297	7
Saturday Afternoon 199er Pairs	86	68	3
Saturday Compact KO Teams	1738	752	16
Saturday Afternoon Swiss Teams	1625	611	8

Total table count: 230   (Sat: 102, Sun: 56, Mon: 72)

367 ACBL players attended, 296 taking home masterpoints, with 1178.08 total masterpoints awarded. Rick Norton Jr from Vista, CA was the overall masterpoint winner, earning 24.74 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 (64), San Diego (158), Coronado Chula-Vista (23), North San Diego (43), and North Inland (13). But some came from further: Dana Harbour (9), the Irvine area (13), the greater Los Angeles region (13), Riverside (4), Palm Springs (11), Inland Valley (4), San Francisco (1), Palo Alto (1), Reno (1), Oregon (1), Phoenix (1), Arkansas (4), South Carolina (1), Mexico (1), and Unknown (2).

Brandon Sheumaker was the Director-in-Charge. He was assisted by Arleen Harvey, Jean Molnar, and Paul Darin (Saturday morning only). They all did a very professional job. Paul got pressed into service as a Tournament Assistant (TA) at the very last hour. Thanks, Paul.

This was a decent sized La Jolla Unit sectional but 30 tables smaller than last year’s sectional, which in turn was slightly smaller than the fantastic 287 table three day May 2013 Sectional and the four day 283½ table May 2009 sectional. Financial recap.

For any given tournament it is difficult to attribute year over year attendance changes to specific causes as opposed to random variation. Possible causes for decreased attendance include the start of the Sacramento regional on the Monday of our tournament and the May 18-25 Bridge Cruise with Eddie Kantar along the California coast. Moreover, Brandon Sheumaker says typical D22 sectional attendance is down about 10% this year.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to our caddies Allison Ogul and Davis Bennett whose hard work and efficiency simplified my job as tournament manager by thirty to forty percent. Allison is our regular unit game caddy. This was her third year working our Memorial weekend sectional at AIB. Davis, Paul Darin’s nephew, has been working at AIB a few days per week for several month and accordingly knows the facility very well. Both caddies have mastered the art of polite crowd control to ensure that all players get at least one helping of all meals served.

The triumvirate of Charlotte Blum, Gail Dunham, and Sally Ishihara provided all the fruit, vegetables, and casseroles on Monday. The burritos served that day came from the Roberto’s Taco Shop located one and a half blocks south of Adventures in Bridge along Mission Gorge Rd. Barbara Blake’s husband picked up the Costco pizza on Sunday.

Matthew Kidd prepared the carrot dish and the corn and tomato dish served on Saturday. Several people have asked for the recipes. The Moroccan Carrot Salad recipe can be found in the January 2010 sectional recipe collection, scaled up five-fold for Saturday. The corn and tomato recipe is roughly based on this recipe from Bon Appétit, scaled up to use 40 ears of corn (at 10 for $2 at Sprouts!) and 36 medium sized tomatoes.

Lynne Anderson was our partnership chair.

Wirt Gilliam, the owner of Adventures in Bridge, was as usual a good host. He even got to enjoy three sessions of bridge.

Special features

This sectional was the first La Jolla unit sectional to hold regionally-rated events. Both Saturday sessions were regionally rated. The extra dollar per player sanction fee was passed on to the players. The unit chose to donate to the Grass Roots Fund and the ACBL Educational Foundation. Read more about this in the May Sectional FAQ. The tournament also included a Board-a-Match (BAM) event on Monday afternoon which replaced the IMP Pairs event held in the same session for the two previous years.

The Iron Butt Awards

The following 20 players receive the iron butt award for playing in all six sessions. Collectively they represent 13% of the total table count.

Freda Anderson Lynne Anderson Barbara Blake Mac Busby Cameron Cotton

Lynne Feldman Timothy Flaherty Bill Grant Kent Hartman Matthew Kidd

Trish Lane Robert Mann Avram Ninyo Susan Ninyo Rick Norton Jr

Lynne O'Neill Judy Rimer Rick Roeder Robert Shore Jon Wright

Seal Clubbing Censure

Some players worship the false idol of masterpoints rather than choosing to play for the love the game and good competition. The Seal Clubbing Censure, new this year, is issued to Larry Sherman whose team chose to play in the Sunday BCD Swiss teams rather than the AX Swiss teams despite being the only team in the 1500–2500 MP bracket. The entire team is not censured because the historical record demonstrates that Larry Sherman is the only common factor in several sandbagging teams and partnerships, ever the advocate for taking the low road. The Sherman-Gu partnership breaks even in the San Diego and La Jolla unit games. Their teammates, Lamya Agelidis and Katherine Moyer are not slouches either; indeed Lamya won her Mini-KcKenney masterpoint bracket at the national level in 2013.

I have no issue with players who avoid open games because they find the competitors to be unfriendly. My experience is that enough players in open games at the regional level are unfriendly and/or engaged in poor behavior, often extreme partnership bickering, to make the experience a bit annoying. But I cast a disparaging eye on those players regularly do well in open games but seize their baby seal clubbing opportunities whenever possible.

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 webmasterlajollabridge.com. Note: cut-and-paste may not work for this e-mail address due to spam prevention measures.

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

I added 9 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

Similar to last year, tournament directors were instructed to vigorously enforce slow play penalties and players were made aware of the policy through a series of three slides (, ) posted at each location where directors collected entries and at the hospitality location.

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. Experience has shown that 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.

Miscellaneous

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 fantastic days rafting down the San Juan river, dropping in at Mexican Hat to float through the Goosenecks, on a trip sponsored by the Glen Canyon Institute. Many other pictures are from local hikes taken with John Strauch and the folks that he has been hiking with for years, decades in some cases.

Matthew Kidd
Unit President