District 24 NAP Dates: Oct 6th A/C + Oct 27th B

As GNT KO season reaches the semifinal and final stages, let’s not forget about the other main grassroots events, the North American Pairs. Unlike GNT, the whole event is done in just one day. Teams that are fighting through 4 rounds of GNTs might appreciate that (opening swiss, quarter finals, semi finals, and finals).

Flight A and Flight C: October 6th, 2024

Open to all District 24 players who meet the residency requirement, the Flight A NAP District Finals will take place on October 6th, Sunday, location and start time TBD but likely to be Honors at 11am. For those eligible for Flight C, we will hold the Flight C event concurrently but you only play against other non-life masters with 0-500 points.

New this year, there is talk within ACBL of raising the limit to 0-750, but still requiring the requirement that you have not achieved Life Master yet. Therefore, for those of you in the 500-750 range who have not yet gotten enough of your gold and silver pigments, you might get a bonus year of eligibility!

Flight B: October 27th, 2024

We are going to try something a bit different for Flight B this year. The date is Sunday, October 27th, 2024, but location and time is truly TBD. Keep in mind the grassroots events are District events, meaning a collaboration between the GNYBA and the NSBA (Nassau Suffolk Bridge Association).

If possible, we would love to have one of the Long Island clubs host the Flight B event next year, but we are still sorting out the details.

Also, at the last Competitions and Conventions Committee meeting, the proposal on the table is to raise Flight B from 0-2500 to 0-3500 next year. Amazingly, there is NO plan to raise the Basic+ Chart above the current 3000 cutoff, meaning Flight B for the first time in history would be upgraded to an Open Chart event. Stay tuned for more…

Club Qualifiers Begin in June 2024

As usual, you need to qualify at the club level first. You may play as many qualifiers as you want, both in online or face-to-face clubs. You qualify as an individual and when October 6th or 27th rolls around, you just need to make sure your partner is District 24 eligible and has also qualified at some point during the June, July, and August qualification period. You don’t need to qualify together, although it’s often a good idea.

Posted in Bridge Thoughts, Events | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

WOW: Bracketing Rules To Change!

The always productive Competitions and Conventions Committee met for the first time in 2024 and passed some extremely sweeping changes. The big one that will impact many of us in the greater District 24 area is the bracketed KO and bracketed RR method.

The Problem

As many of us have seen, most tournaments in NJ / NY / New England all follow the same rule: you may either play your natural bracket based on Masterpoints, or alternatively you may play the top bracket. However, you may not play partially up, for example, upgrading from the bottom bracket to the 2nd from bottom or 3rd from bottom.

For years this was a frustration point for not just underrated teams, but teams who wanted to play complex conventions only allowed in Open Chart, or systems disallowed in Basic, etc. More importantly, the other teams are happy to see the ringers depart their bracket. Win all around.

Proposal for Playing Up in Team Events

A team playing in a KO or round robin may state the number of Masterpoints they would like to be bracketed as (in addition to their actual masterpoint total). This must be more than their actual number of Masterpoints. This must be done at the time of initial entry. The directors will place the team in a bracket as if they had that many points unless doing so would cause a disruption to the event.

BOOM.

And just like that, years of underrated B and C players arguing with directors become moot. The C&C Committee passed the proposal unanimously, with a nod toward the convention chart uncertainty problem, and that the ultimate decision is still down to the directors who have your original actual Masterpoints handy in case granting your playing-up request would disrupt the event. That is codeword for saying they really don’t want to push a team down, because point wise it just doesn’t make sense.

Why At the Time of Initial Entry?

As for why the election must be done at the time of the initial entry, we specifically don’t want teams trying to inspect the brackets looking for marks. Therefore, you are not allowed to see the brackets forming and then decide how far up you want to play. If you invoke the new rule, be prepared with the augmented number your team is comfortable playing because you won’t be allowed to toggle it down.

What Number Would Your Favorite Team Choose?

So imagine your favorite and usual 4-person Bracketed RR Team going to a large regional. What team total would you put down? Do you start with double and see how that goes? For example, everyone has right around 1000 but you write 8000 as your total? Or perhaps make it more objective: Take your actual team point total, but add 100 for each Red and Blue Ribbon Qualifier?

Posted in ACBL News, Bridge Thoughts | Tagged | Leave a comment

GNYBA Award Game 2024

The GNYBA Award Game is both a celebration of Mini McKenney and Ace of Clubs winners from the past 6 years. It is also a chance to welcome all players back to the face-to-face club, since pre-Covid, club play was a huge component of any race winner’s MP earnings.

What is the Award Game?

You can think of it as something special, or just an ordinary game, both are perfectly fine ways to enjoy the evening. We had wine and cheese, cake, stickers and photos for the winners, and a welcome speech from our Unit president. But for people there solely for the bridge, just think of it as a lively game and a chance to see familiar faces and meet new friends.

This was a first-ever event to lookup back and include six years of prior year winners, from 2018-2023. Technically, there was a GNYBA Award Dinner in April of 2019, but that only celebrated one year of winners; every year after we postponed due to either NYC not being open (due to the pandemic), or Honors not being open (because it was Bridge and Games, and not the Brian Glubok version). In addition, it simply took us a while to get organized and for a viable evening game to form (if you haven’t been, Wed night at Honors is amazing).

The Masterpoint Races

Each race is broken up into many brackets, so if you began 2024 with between 0-5 Masterpoints (or joined mid year), then you are in the 0-5 bracket. The full set of bracket are 0-5, 5-20, 20-50, 50-100, 100-200, 200-300, 300-500, 500-1000, 1000-1500, 1500-2500, 2500-3500, 3500-5000, 5000-7500, 7500-10000, and 10000+.

For each such bracket, there are now three different races. Your bracket includes your total Masterpoints from the prior year. Each race counts the number of qualifying points you earn that calendar year. Regardless of whether you started with 101 or 199, you are in the 100-200 bracket that year, even if you end up earning 200 and skip an entire bracket year.

Mini McKenney: Counts all pigmented points won throughout the year. The key word is pigmented. Black is a pigment, but what used to be called “online points” or “colorless points” are not. So online play CAN help you win mini McKenney, but only when you participate in the correct type of games that give black, silver, red, or gold.

Ace of Clubs: Counts black points won at clubs. Starting in 2023, only black points won in face-to-face clubs count. Also confusing, STaC week points do NOT count.

Ace of Virtual Clubs: New in 2023, counts only black points won in online virtual clubs. Somewhat ambiguous is whether silver linings week or various random gold point club weeks count.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Flight B Live Results

Results after lunch.

final results and bracket:

Jonas-Silver (top seed bye)

Kuang vs Poon (seed 2)

Tetzlaff vs Sigward (3rd seed)

Yang vs Mandell (4th seed)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Lipkin Leads Championship Flight Opening Round

Six teams entered the GNT Championship Flight opening round today to play 50 boards in a round robin. They played 10 rounds of 5 boards each, which allows for more match awards and more flexibility or the 5-handed and 6-handed teams. That’s different from the way Flight A operated 3 weeks ago, where we played 8 segments but treated the day as 4 longer 12-board matches.

The defending champions last year consisting of Mike Lipkin, Mustafa Cem Tokay, Erez Hendelman, and David Gurvich finished in the lead with 130.57 Victory Points. Technically, this team is a repeat of last year’s championship flight winners and qualify for favorable seeding. However, it was irrelevant due to the round robin format and clearly not necessary. They won 6 out of the 10 matches.

Close behind was Team Eisenstein with 126.07 Victory Points, who actually won more matches with 7 out of 10 wins (but apparently fewer landslide wins). First seed Lipkin chose to play against Team Baseggio in the semi-finals tomorrow, leaving Team Eisenstein to play Team Miniter.

Salute to the Three-Flight Players

It is especially rare to find players who are willing to play in three different flights of GNT in the same year. Four years ago we had a list of 10 such players. This year, it seems to only be two: Kari Tetzlaff and Jack Boge.

Note that one must be in the 0-2500 range to even pull this off; with our careful scheduling, one can only play Champ-A-B or Champ-B-C, because A and C are held on the same day, disallowing A-B-C. There were also some concerns about playing Championship and B in the same year. If a team plays in the opening round and survives until the 2nd day, then the conditions require that they continue playing Championship and abandon any Flight B ambitions.

Posted in Events, Results | Tagged , | Leave a comment

WOW: The GNYBA Bulletin from 1984

In the middle of all the GNT excitement, we have uncovered an absolute treasure from 40 years ago thanks to Adam Wildavsky. Decades ago, the GNYBA published a regular bulletin and we have our hands on the November 1984 copy.

What was going on then? Jeff Bayone was then owner and manager of the Manhattan Bridge Club, joining in his first year on the board. The club qualifier stage of the GNT Flight B was beginning — back then you had club qualifiers just like with NAPs. There was no fourth Flight C GNT, and not even a third flight. It was just Open and B (0-500 at that time). Also on the GNYBA board was Margie Gwozdzinsky, of Countess Cup fame, and treasurer Aileen Osofsky, former chair of the ACBL Goodwill Committee.

The GNYBA Winter Regional (Renamed Edgar Kaplan Regional Later)

Surprise, our regional was still right around the December holidays, only back then it was part of a vast schedule of many sectionals and regionals from surrounding units and districts (GNYBA, NSBA, NJBL, WCBA, and D3 Tri-State). It would appear Unit 155 and Unit 242, even back then, kept our regionals separate despite all begin part of District 24.

A few interesting things to note. Regionals used to have a smoking and non-smoking section?? Does that mean East West pairs would have to rotate through a lot of North-South smokers, or was there literally a field of all smokers and a field of non smokers? For teams, is there a smoking bracket and non-smoking bracket? All intriguing questions. If anyone knows or has any other copies of the old GNYBA bulletin, please email them to us!

Apparently back then a 3-day regional at the Sheraton was profitable and drew tons of tables (or so I hear). It also seems the tournament schedule was MUCH more heavily focused on team events. You have a KO lasting Fri-Sun. You have 0-750 Swiss on Saturday and Sunday. Open Swiss Sunday, even consolation evening Swiss paying half red half black on Sunday, and Speedball swiss at 11:30pm Saturday?!? Was this all before the Goldman Pairs existed?

I see the tournament schedule was similarly confusing to newer players even back then, so I feel less bad about how crazy and intimidating our flyers still are today…

There was previously a club called Bridge and Games, not the renamed Cavendish that got us through Covid, but one run by Brian Glubok even further east than the old and new Honors. The teaching staff included Alan Miller, Augie Boehm, and quite a lot of familiar names.

We will dive more into the old Post Mortem’s in the coming weeks, but I very much hope to collect a few more issues. Please send them along to your favorite board member and they will pass it to us.

Posted in Bridge Thoughts | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

GNT Flight B Seeding Problem

We have an interesting first world problem. There are a lot of teams signed up for GNT Flight B this year in District 24. In fact, it is popular enough that the every eligible member of our District GNT Committee is playing (those with fewer than 2500 Masterpoints). The more senior members of our GNT Committee are not in a good position to seed the teams. Also, Flight B is likely to use the classic “two groups” method of splitting the field, which we used in Flight A and Flight C.

Masterpoints to the Rescue?

The simplest solution is to seed based on Masterpoints, which everyone knows is not great, but at least is objective and should draw the least amount of process complaints. At least doing things this way, it is no worse than randomly seeding, and should be deterministic.

Straight Swiss?

Another simple method that should draw no procedural complaints: forget trying to use a round robin and forget seeding. The opening round at the national finals is a swiss, with all the randomness that comes with matching opponents by cumulative Victory Points with no playbacks. You might pull a swiss gambit, you might get an unlucky run of opponents, you might chance upon the right few crucial blitzes to pull ahead. The only guarantee is that it is slightly unfair for everyone — you won’t face every team in your group.

Defending ChampionsTeam Goodspeed

Regardless of seeding method, Team Goodspeed qualifies under our definition of defending champions from the prior year (one of the top 2 teams in the District finals with a majority of identical team members). With captain Celia Verrier, Carole Pasquarelli, and Joann Goodspeed as the three returning members (Lore Monnig is unable to attend Toronto this year), this team will receive favorable seeding, a sufficiently vague definition that hopefully everyone trusts the committee will be able to honor in law and spirit.

Fun fact, Team Jonas-Silver narrowly misses the other defending champion favorable seeding benefit. They would have qualified had it not been for two unrelated, personal and last minute calamities that required a 15-minutes-before-game-time reconfiguration in May 2023. With only two members of last year’s team returning, they will be seeded along with the rest of us.

Seeding Ourselves?

The District 25 folks, aka New England, have an interesting way to seed. The captains all seed themselves. Meaning, each captain stack ranks every other team (no ties allowed), omitting their own team, and submits it to the director in charge. The director aggregates the rankings weighing everyone’s opinion equally and comes up with a total ordering.

Everyone’s first objection is the rankings from some captains might not be accurate. In fact, you might go step one further and ponder whether there is some advantage to ranking a strong team low or a weak team high. However, if there is some obvious way to benefit from such a method, with or without collusion, it’s not obvious how to truly game it. Plus, if discovered it could be considered an interesting ethical violation.

Forming a Special Committee

Most likely we will need to invite a few key players who knows a majority of the Flight B field and ask them to be part of a seeding committee. They will then submit their groupings to the director who will have a final ruling on what is most appropriate. Ideally seeding has minimal impact, but it can create relatively large consequences for the KO phase, not just the quarterfinals but all subsequent rounds. Do we have any takers, not planning to play, that will volunteer for this glorious task?

Posted in Bridge Thoughts, Events | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Smirnov Advances to GNT-C Semi Finals

The 2nd KO of the KO-packed GNT season has completed with Smirnov prevailing to the semi-finals with a 65-22 halftime score and finishing the match with a final score of 114-34.

First off, congratulations to the 5th place team consisting of Jim Diederich, Thierry Bonnet, Barbara Marsh, and Rita Bar-Or. Each player will receive 6.67 Masterpoints, half gold half red, which are crucial pigments needed to eventually earn the rank of Life Master. The points will also count toward this year’s Mini McKenney races, but not the Ace of Clubs or Ace of Virtual Clubs (because even though the entire event took place at Honors, this is a District event).

Next up, Team Smirnov will play against Team Li, with quite a lot on the line. Any team that advances to the finals will receive an invitation to represent New York City and Long Island in the national finals in Toronto this July. It will be the winner of Smirnov vs Li in addition to the other side of the Flight C bracket, consisting now of Team Lupoff, Team Oratofsky, and Team Moscow.

Will There Be A 3rd and 4th Place?

Also, in one final twist, it is possible the two semi-final losing teams will need to play a match or merge into one team to determine the 1st alternates for Toronto. Why might a team not go to Toronto? Some people simply can’t take 5 days off to play bridge. Others might have no interest in going to the national finals, but wanted to play in a fun and friendly District wide event to earn gold points. Whatever the reason, should any of the eventual two winners opt not to attend, we need a clear 1st alternate team.

This occurred last year when Team Verrier and Team Latta advanced to the finals of Flight B, but Latta also reached the finals of Flight C. After Team Latta opted to go to nationals in Flight C, the original 3rd and 4th place teams, Petsch and Schwartz, merged into one team.

Posted in Events, Results | Tagged , | 1 Comment

All GNT KO Matches Scheduled

Let’s give all the advancing captains in Flight A and C a huge round of applause. Every first round KO match seems to be scheduled, most of them in February!

Flight A Semi Finals

First, the early bird award goes to Dziekanski vs Jonas-Silver, the Flight A wild card match. Because we had 10 teams in the opening round of Flight A, we split the field into two groups of five, one led by defending champion Trabulus and the other led by defending finalist Chang. Each group advanced the top two teams, and the 3rd place team from only one of the brackets would advance as the wildcard 5th team. Team Jonas-Silver narrowly beat Boge by less than a Victory Point (39.95 vs 39.31), allowing the wild card to play a heads up wildcard KO for a chance at the semi finals.

They quickly scheduled and played their 48 board match this week with Dziekanski, prevailing with a final segment comeback: down by 7 IMPs with 12 boards to go but then pulling it together for +8 IMPs to end the match 50-42). Not advancing is Maya Jonas-Silver, Jack Latta, David Yoon, and Randi Edelman, who win 13.33 gold points each and the official 5th place spot in this year’s District 24 Flight A.

Team Dziekanski will play Team Chang in a 48 board match on Wed night 2/28 and Friday night 3/1.

On the other side of the bracket, free from any wild card match, Team Ekinci will play Team Trabulus over 48 boards on March 7th in a straight afternoon and evening same day match (a good simulation of the daily 52 board KOs during the GNTs at NABC). EDIT: This match is not yet 100% confirmed, they might still try to do it over 2 days, stay tuned.

Will we see a rematch of Trabulus vs Chang this year in the finals, or will Ekinci or Dziekanski push through? Teams that reach the finals will receive 30 gold points and a blue ribbon qualifier for the Mini Blue or Blue Ribbon Pairs at nationals.

Flight C Quarter Finals

We already wrote about the Flight C Trophy Wars, or Battle of the Countess vs Inter-Club Cups. Oratofsky vs Moscow will take place on 2/29, Thursday night at Honors.

The other match is Team Smirnov vs Team Diederich, scheduled for Sunday, 2/18 for 30 boards. Captain James Diederich took first overall during the Gellas Newcomer Pairs event held at the Midtown Hilton in October 2022. Teammate Thierry Bonnet that year also won the Helen Shanbrom Ace of Clubs masterpoint race in District 24. That year both face-to-face and online black counted towards the same Masterpoints race, the final year prior to the Ace of Virtual Clubs separation in 2023.

Opposing captain Ivan Smirnov was the winner of the GNYBA silver point Rising Stars cup in June 2023 with a big 69% afternoon session to beat fellow Flight C quarterfinalists Oratofsky and Soloman. Ivan’s teammates Stephanie Chamberlain and Sheri Elowsky also have their own GNYBA tournament victory: they won the overall 1st place award during the final Saturday Gold Rush of the Astoria Regional, which won pure gold points and an invitation to the Red Ribbon Pairs in Toronto NABCs.

The winner of this match faces off against Opening Round group winners Team Li, who received a bye along with Team Rockoff during the quarterfinal KO round.

Paying KO Round Card Fees

New this year, we are piloting accepting credit card payments for the KO round. You will no longer need to pay the hosting club, which was previously a messy process where teams give cash to the club director, who may or may not know the correct amount to charge you.

Posted in Results | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

GNT Knock Outs: Trophy Wars

We’ve entered the GNT phase that everyone both loves and hates: the KO rounds.

For those in Flight C playing GNTs for the first time, congratulations. You are guaranteed to win a big chunk of gold and red points, but apologies if you thought it was all over in one day! The KOs have been in the conditions every year for an eternity, but no one reads it until their team qualifies past day one.

Trophy Wars: Rising Stars Cup versus Interclub Cup

One anticipated KO match in Flight C is Team Oratofsky vs. Team Moscow (the winner will face off against Team Rockoff). Paul Oratofsky and Steve Soloman entered the NYC tournament scene during the GNYBA June Sectional scoring silver points in both sessions of the Countess Cup, then followed up with an impressing back-to-back first overall finish in both morning and afternoon sessions of the Rising Stars Cup during the Astoria Regional.

Team captain John Moscow has two cups on display: the Interclub Season Winning Team and the Interclub Season Winning Pair, both found in the trophy case at the Harvard Club of New York. Their team consists of four regular players from the Interclub Bridge League, including Laszlo Seress, who represented our District in spring 2021 for NAP Flight C.

This match will take place on leap year day, February 29th, Thursday 6pm at Honors with former GNT Flight C national champion Sam Kuang officiating as table director.

Past Victors from District 24?

Sam is the first player in D24 to ever win the GNT-C national finals in 2014, followed by Lucy Zhang in 2018. Interestingly, they were playing for D21 and D23 respectively at the time of their victory. You have to fast forward to 2021 when the team captained by Henrui Xing won with an all D24 team, followed by last year’s 1st and 2nd place victories of Team Boge and Team Mandel.

GNT-A: Dziekanski vs Jonas-Silver

The final 24 boards of the match versus Team Dziekanski and Team Jonas-Silver takes place today, Feb 10th, at Honors. After the first two segments, the score was 28-11 followed by 47-31 with Dziekanski in the lead by about slightly more than one game swing. That’s a fairly thin margin at the halfway point of a 48-board match, so anything can happen as they enter segments three and four.

The winner of the match will play against Mini Spingold veterans on Team Chang in the semi-final KO to determine who gets 20 gold versus 30 gold and an invitation to the Blue Ribbon Pairs during the Fall NABCs, as well as advancement to the District final KO against the winner of the Trabulus and Ekinci match.

Posted in Events, Results | Tagged , , | 1 Comment