When you decide to play bridge, you have a number of options. Of course you may choose to play non-competetive (or perhaps very competetive) social bridge. If you are looking to test your skills against a larger pool of people, then ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) events are a good option. And even there you have options. You can play at your local duplicate club, or in tournaments of various sizes. Recently I had the opportunity to play in a small regional tournament and I thought I'd write about the experience.
Regionals are the second largest level of tournament in the ACBL (only Nationals are bigger, while sectionals tend to be smaller). Nevertheless, the Newton MA regional is fairly small. It mostly takes place in one large ballroom in a hotel. There are several different sessions you can play in. There were team knockouts where teams compete in single elimination tournaments. There was a 299er pairs game, for which you are eligible if neither member of your partnership has more than 300 masterpoints (for comparison, I have about 4). There was an open stratified pairs game where everybody is eligible and plays against everybody else, but the final rankings are computed for the different stratifications of masterpoints. These types of events you will find everywhere. The Newton Regional has one unique event as well: Individual. I was planning to play in the open pairs with Frank Morgan (professor at Williams) and then in the two session individual.
Upon arriving and meeting up with Frank, we went to the entry table to register. We were playing in flight C (which meant for this event that neither of us had more than 750 masterpoints). We paid our fee and were given a slip of paper with our original seat assignment. We were pair 5NS in the C section. This meant we didn't have to move! We sat down and greeted our first opponents and began to play.
The play itself was no different than what you might see in a club-just in a much bigger ballroom. You play 2 or 3 hands against each pair and then they move on to the next table. We weren't directly competing with the pairs at our table, but rather with all the other N/S pairs; 10 others in our section, and 11 in the section next to us.
What is different is the scoring. After about 3.5 hours of play, the event was over and we could move on to see our scores. You can see for yourself at the New England Bridge website. You'll have to scroll down a bit to find our section of the Sat. Morning open pairs. First you'll see our names, and then our placing in the overall (N/S) standing in the 3 different flights. Every pair gets ranked in their flight and all higher flights. You'll see that we ranked even in the top flight A! You can also see how we did just in our section (the N/S's who played the same E/W's that we did). We won flight C! You can also find our raw score, and the percentage of total possible points we received (63% is quite good), and at least, the masterpoints we received. Underneath this table you can see our results on each hand we played. For example, on hand 1, we got a bottom (worst) score. On hand 2, we got a top (best score).
After a quick lunch, Frank and I registered for the Individual event. Here we would be in different flights (I remained in flight C, while for this event, with between 200 and 750 masterpoints, he was in flight B). Again, I received a slip of paper and found my seat, and introduced myself to my partner for the first round.
In the individual, you play with a new partner and new opponents every 2-3 boards. This makes for a lot of really quick introductions of the form: "Hi, I'm Matt, and I play 2 over 1 with 15-17 NT and transfers and RKCB and ..." as you must quickly agree on the basics of a bidding system in about 1 minute. Of course, the systems are simple, and standard american yellow card (not so different from 8-NT standard) is the basis. Other that that, the tournament plays out similarly to the pairs game, except now, since I was sitting East (in section C) I was competing only against other East's.
If you scroll down the same page above, you'll find my results in the afternoon session. Again, pretty good! I was in the top half of my section, and 2nd in C (of course, there were only 4 in C). But, this was a two session event. I had to come back in the evening to see how I'd do overall. You can see my evening starting seat assignment. Everything was arranged so that everyone would have entirely new partners for the evening session. Alas, I did not do as well. I didn't place in my section, and the sum of my two scores narrowly missed placing in flight C (278.5 would have done it). Ah well, a fun experience nevertheless.
To see the hand records, and all the tournament results visit the district page.
And Happy New Year!
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