- (Next up: Ocean Shores Regional 2024, November 4-10 in Ocean Shores WA, 75 miles west of Olympia, watch for the Daily Bulletin pages to appear in mid-October.)
- Puget Sound Regional August 19 - 25, 2024 in Lynnwood WA, north of Seattle. Possibly the DINO regional site with the most variety in nearby eateries!
- Penticton Regional, June 10 - 16, 2024 in Penticton BC, still Canada's largest Regional, this year with the added Canadian Championships running alongside the tournament.
- (The 2024 Vancouver Regional was canceled when the venue became unavailable.)
- Finally! Final 2023 Kirkwood Trophy Standings, the District 19 annual masterpoint race, after Regionals in Victoria, Penticton, Lynnwood, and Leavenworth.
- Leavenworth Regional October 23 - 29, 2023 in Leavenworth WA, a Bavarian-themed town about two hours drive east of Everett WA.
- Puget Sound Regional August 21 - 27, 2023 in Lynnwood WA, north of Seattle. Possibly the DINO regional site with the most variety in nearby eateries!
- Penticton Regional, June 17 - 23, 2023 in Penticton BC, recovering towards the pre-pandemic status of Canada's largest Regional.
- NEW! After the 2023 Victoria Regional I did some programming and created a new set of daily pages with round-by-round leaders for all pair and Swiss Team events. Following the usual list of overall winners, each strat has its own leader table which lists the top X pairs in that strat. (X is a bit less than double the number of overall places in that strat; I figure those who did worse than that don't need the details of their struggles publicized...). The tables are colour-coded by current percentage after each round and include popups that appear showing even more details. These will appear in the Penticton Bulletins and the Victoria Bulletins with them are also online (add a 2 before '.html' in the address: tue.html is the original page; tue2.html is the new version with the round-by-round details.) A full explanation and an example is here.
- Victoria Regional, April 17-23, 2023 in the capital city of B.C. (New versions of pages with the new round-by-round results: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday )
- Final 2022 Kirkwood Trophy Standings, the District 19 annual masterpoint race, after all four Regionals (Whistler results now included).
- Whistler Regional November 3-9, 2022 in Whistler BC, 2010 Olympic co-host city, about 125km (80 miles) north of Vancouver.
- Puget Sound Regional August 22-28, 2022 in Lynnwood WA, north of Seattle.
- Penticton Regional, June 13-19, 2022 in Penticton BC, Canada's largest Regional, in rebuilding mode.
- Leavenworth Regional April 4-10, 2022 in Leavenworth WA, a Bavarian-themed town about two hours drive east of Everett WA.
- Whistler Regional October 28-November 3, 2019 in Whistler BC, Olympic ski resort about 80 minutes drive north of Vancouver.
- Tri-Cities Regional October 21-27, 2019 in Pasco WA, in southeastern Washington State.
- Puget Sound Regional August 19-26, 2019 in Lynnwood WA, north of Seattle.
- Penticton Regional, June 10-16, 2019 in Penticton BC, Canada's largest Regional.
- Victoria Regional, April 8-14, 2019 in the capital city of B.C.
- How These Work: Each link above takes you to the Welcome page for that tournament. There are links from each page to the seven daily pages and the photos, masterpoints, table counts, and ACBL Live links. The daily pages begin with a list of events with detailed descriptions, and the winners of them at the last tournament, but at the end of that day morph into results and updated masterpoint leaders and occasional news items.
- Tuesdays at VBC, $40/team, 24 boards starting at 7pm, ending around 9:30pm. (ALERT: The VBC's impending move to new premises limits us to day games for the next little while, so SMILE has been put on hold. I will use the time to crunch the data and try to get some masterpoints for the players who played!)
- usually four 6-board matches (if two or four teams show up, three 8-board matches)
- preduplicated boards, BridgeMate scoring, optional comparing at the end with teammates
- all year: three "seasons" (Summer, Fall, Spring) divided into 2-3 "segments" of 6-10 weeks
- standings reset each segment so each team gets a new start
- masterpoints are awarded at the end of each season for overall leaders and match awards
- play as often as you wish; teams playing most often get to remove some of their worst results
- teams trying it out are welcome, as are spares, substitutes, fifths and sixths
- The SMILE website has smileys, results, standings, hand records, rules, and colours and is updated shortly after each game!
- October 21, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- October 14, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- October 7, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- September 30, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- September 23, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- September 16, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- September 9, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- September 2, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- August 26, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- August 19, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- August 12, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
- August 5, 2024 (results and deal notes included!)
(In late September 2023 Entry Express went "into the shop" to respond to complaints received by users who have encountered difficulties. We expect it to be back in operation in mid-to-late 2024 for Regionals and Sectionals. When that happens, we'll update the article above and re-introduce the list of nearby tournaments and links, so you can easily find the tournaments you're thinking of attending.)
Further details about the league are here.
The COVID pandemic shut down offline bridge in March 2020. We moved the Monthly Unit Games online and the 2020 MUG race is complete, but the other masterpoint races were held over and ended at the end of 2022. Free plays given out for the 2019-2021 races were extended when live bridge returned in Spring 2022. For 2024, Unit 430 is rotating Unit Games among several clubs so that everyone in the Unit can play one, and the news about where the next one is should be at the Unit 430 site (link).
- McBruce on the ACBL Convention Card (the old one, which will be with us for awhile before clubs and tournaments run out, which may be a good thing because the complaints about the new one will be with us for years, bridge players hating to have to conform to anything different....)
- There is more stuff like this on some of the VVBC pages.
(April 11, 2020)
Here is a strange 98-year-old chess problem. White, moving from bottom to top, to play and win.
Hold on. That’s not the problem. 14 of the 16 Black pieces are unable to move and the 15th, the Black Queen, is trapped and can only move back and forth one space. The remaining Black piece, the rightmost Black Knight, can move, and once it does, other pieces will be freed up one by one, leading to a quick end for White. The only way to avoid this is to capture the Knight with the White King.
That’s the easy part. And it leaves Black only one possible move next, the queen moving to the corner.
Now. What next? Be very careful! See the whole board and have a plan for an eventual win...
Click anywhere on this paragraph to see the answer. But give it a try first! It's a good test of your ability to think logically; assuming you know the rules of chess.
Not many chess problems pit a king and a pawn against the entire army of the opposition! No idea how the opponent managed to get himself into this awkward trap, but there is a way for White to win. To find it, you will need to remember a few key rules of chess pertaining to how pawns move and promote. Also, you need to find a way to checkmate the Black King despite the army of pieces it has protecting it.
That's probably the best place to start. Now that we have taken the Black Knight with our King and Black is in a holding pattern, forced to move the Black Queen back and forth, we can first envision possible ways to win against this colossus of Black pieces, since the problem claims there is a way.
Certainly it will involve moving the Pawn forward and promoting. Then, presumably, the promoted Pawn will, as a piece, move into the colossus and capture some pieces and give checkmate. The first problem is how to accomplish this without allowing Black pieces to escape.
Maybe we can capture some of the Pawns in the column of four and then capture the Black Rook with a promoted Queen, giving check. Two problems with this approach: 1) We can pick off the top two pawns in the column of four, but the third is protected by the Rook, and 2) even if we could, the other Rook, the one we intend to capture to give check, is protected by the remaining Black Knight.
So that's a dead end and leaves only one other possibility: promoting the Pawn instead to a Knight and trying to checkmate the White King that way. Is there a weakness that we can exploit?
There is! If we capture the Black Rook on the light coloured square to give check, after picking off the top two pawns in the chain above the Black King, only the Black Queen can prevent this, and if we time it so that the Black Queen is in the corner when we capture the Rook, the checkmate succeeds! Now we're getting somewhere.
But how can we ensure that the timing is right? Knights always alternate between light and dark-coloured squares every time they move. We have to ensure that after capturing the two pawns, we are on a dark-coloured square when the Queen is on a light-coloured square (and vice versa), so that eventually we move to a dark-coloured square a Knight's move away from the Rook we want to capture. Then the Black queen is forced to move from the light-coloured square to the corner, and we strike!
Note that not only does the Knight switch colours every time it moves, but so does a Pawn, with one exception. A Pawn in its original position on the second row may advance two squares, staying on the same coloured square by skipping one. If you begin by taking the White Knight, Black's Queen moves to the corner, and then advancing the Pawn two squares, our Pawn-soon-to-become-a-Knight is on a square of the same colour as the Black Queen and will remain so whatever you do from here to the end of the game. You will never be able to fix this problem and capture the Rook without being captured by the Queen on the next move!
So instead, we must be patient and move the Pawn forward only ONE square on our second move. This restores the parity we want between the colours of the squares our Pawn-later-Knight and the Black Queen are on. But there is one further snag that we must be careful about. Can you see the potential remaining blunder?
Remember, before capturing the Rook for checkmate, we must first capture the two pawns that might protect the Rook. It may seem like we can capture these two Pawns in whichever order we please, but in fact we must capture the top one first. If we capture the bottom one first, on the next move we must vacate the space, and the other pawn can move down a square. We can still capture this Pawn but the single non-Queen move destroys the parity, and our Knight will never be able to capture the Rook with the Queen stuck in the corner!
So it takes at least nineteen moves to capture the Knight with the King, promote the Pawn, capture the two Black Pawns in the correct order, and then capture the Black Rook with the Queen stuck in the corner forced to watch the checkmate. If you managed to clear all the hurdles, congrats!