The 2019 Penticton Regional Start Page

Gateway to masterpoints, results, photos

Basic Tournament Information

Location: Penticton is one of several main cities of the Okanagan region of British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province.  The tournament site is the Penticton Trade and Convention Centre in northern Penticton, near the Okanagan Lake waterfront and its many surrounding hotels and motels.  Downtown shopping, as well as dozens of hotels, motels and restaurants of all types, are all within a few city blocks, while several larger shopping centres are a short drive away in south Penticton.  Penticton's climate in early June is usually nice, with very little rain (they warn vociferously on the local weather channels if rain is coming and often it lasts only a few minutes!) and very warm temperatures.

Driving: Penticton is right in the middle of a sequence of south Okanagan communities from Kelowna and West Kelowna in the north, south along highway 97 through Peachland, Summerland, Penticton, then further south through Kaleden, Okanagan Falls, Oliver, and Osoyoos near the U.S. Border.  From the west coast most will take the Trans-Canada highway from Vancouver to Hope, then the Coquihalla Highway to Merritt, then east on 97C to the Peachland exit, then south to Penticton, but the alternate route is Highway 3 from Hope to Princeton, Keremeos, then north on 3A to Kaleden and then north to Penticton.  From the east most will go through Kelowna to West Kelowna and Peachland, then south, but there are other routes.  From the USA there are no interstates in northern Washington state, but several highway crossings into the Okanagan region, and Highway 3 on the Canadian side connects Osoyoos, near Oroville WA, to points east and west just north of the border: from Hope and Princeton in the west to Grand Forks and Castlegar and Creston in eastern B.C.  This means that you can easily reach Penticton from wherever you choose to cross.

Transit: Penticton Transit has several routes that go past the tournament site, and connects places as far as Cherry Lane Mall, Skaha Lake, and downtown to the Trade and Convention Centre.  Some routes go way up the eastern hillside and allow for panoramic views of the city!  Other routes go as far as Princeton, Osoyoos and Kelowna, but are much less frequent.

Restaurants and Shops: The Trade and Convention Centre is near many local restaurants and shops of all types, mostly near the northern beachfront but with many good options a short drive away.  Cherry Lane Mall, about 10-15 minutes drive in south central Penticton is the main shopping mall, about 2 km away on Main Street, but there are a few other shopping centres.  The downtown area has a few small grocery stores but for a large grocery store you will need to travel a bit further.

Tournament Site: Parking in the lots outside the main playing area is free; as the complex expands they have built a bit more parking on the southwest side a short walk from the site.  Like most places, Penticton bylaws ask that smokers not smoke near entrance doors, so let's do our best to stay on the right side of that one.  Players should note that the use of cellphones (which includes them making noise even though you thought you had squelched it) in the playing area is a bad habit that may lose you matchpoints and leave you with a difficult explanation to partner or teammates.

Tournament Guide: No tournament guide this year; instead, signs have been posted detailing where, when and how to claim door prizes and winners prizes.  The setup for the speakers and the latenight music are mostly the same as last year, with Jerry Helms doing three days beginning Wednesday and Patti Tucker doing Tuesday's presentation.  Tonight Wendy Rodocker will provide some post-game music and Friday night we will hear Kyle Anderson

Dates, Times, Events, Fees: 8:45 am, 1:00 pm, and 7:15 pm are the start times from Tuesday thru Saturday.  The tournament begins on Monday June 10 at 7:30 pm, with a Monday-Tuesday Knockout Teams, a Charity Open Pairs which had 99 tables last year, and a 199er Pairs.  On Sunday June 16, play begins at 9:30 am with stratified two-session Open and Senior Swiss Teams, a Bracketed 0-2000 Swiss Teams, and a Fast Open Pairs, as well as a pair of single session 199er Swiss Team events.  Sessions should end 3¼ - 3½ hours after they begin, on Sunday things should end by about 5:30pm, and possibly earlier.  Morning Sessions from Tuesday to Saturday have two pair events: the Early Bird Side Game Series (open pairs), and a 199er Pairs game, but there is a three-day Morning Knockout on Wednesday-Thursday-Friday and a Morning Swiss Teams on Friday-Saturday.  The main sessions are afternoon and evening, with new afternoon-evening knockout teams starting on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, a Compact Knockout on Saturday and the familiar single session Swiss Teams in the evening for teams that are unlucky in the main knockouts.  There is also a Zip Knockout Teams on Thursday evening starting at 10:45pm that attracted an astounding 18 teams last year!  Each day from Tuesday thru Saturday has a two-session Open and Gold Rush Pairs, and three Side Game Series for Morning, Tuesday-Thursday Afternoon and Evening, and Friday-Saturday Afternoon and Evening Games.  There are three single session 199er games every day from Tuesday thru Saturday, as well as the Monday night opener, and the two single-session 199er Swiss Teams on Sunday.  There are also 49er games for players with less than 50 masterpoints, every afternoon from Tuesday-Saturday.  Players in all games will need to have an ACBL number (even from a membership that has lapsed); those without an ACBL number will need to purchase a temporary membership for $9.95.  The per-session entry fee of (probably) $15 will have a $4 surcharge per session for players whose memberships have lapsed.  A separate line near the selling table will allow you to purchase entry vouchers with debit and credit cards; these still need to be taken into the main line, but relieve you of the burden of collecting enough cash before buying.  Pair game entries for afternoon and evening games will be outside near the stage and dancing area, all morning events and all team games will be sold at the Director's desk, inside the playing area.

This Web Site: We have a group of pages linked together by links bars like this one:

Daily Pages: Before the day's events are processed, these will contain a schedule of events in this order:

• Morning-only Games
• Two Session Afternoon and Evening Games
• Afternoon-only Single Session Games
• Evening-only Single Session Games

There will be details on each event, what type of game it is, what the strat limits are, the winners at the previous Penticton Regional in 2018, and a direct link to the ACBL Live results, which will be active following each session.

At the end of the day Director-In-Charge Doug Rankin will give me the day's results and I will process them into the website in the early hours of the morning.  The 'day completed' version will feature the following:

• Masterpoint Leaders at the end of the day (not including events that are not yet complete
• Noteworthy News Items Received
• Two Session Pair Games: Open Pairs, Gold Rush Pairs
• Two Session Swiss or Bracketed Teams
• Single Session Open Swiss Teams
• Completed Knockouts
• Rosters for Surviving Teams in Knockouts that are not yet complete
• Side Games
• Side Game Series Leaders
• 199er and 49er Pairs

Once a day is complete, no changes will be made to the Web Site unless I hear about late scoring corrections.  Some browsers save a copy of a page and do not check to see if the content has changed; if you're not getting anything new, in most browsers you should be able to hit F5 to reload the page and stop using the one your computer has saved.

Other Pages: You're looking at the Welcome page right now.  The Masterpoints! Page, which we call DUMPS (Daily Updated Master Point Summary) will be updated every night first, before the daily pages of results take shape, and will contain the latest masterpoint totals and tournament leaders, both overall and limited to non-Life Masters.  Also, they will have everyone's current total broken down into red and gold points, but will not include masterpoints already won in events that have yet to be completed.  The Photos Page will depend on people sending me photos taken.  Now that everyone's cellphone has a camera, anyone can do this!  Here is a good guideline on how to get best results:

• Above the Strike Zone: Try not to include in the frame any part of the body below where the letters would be on a baseball uniform.  People want to see faces, not waistlines.  If you have people of different heights, you might have to include the tall one's strike zone(s), but make faces your focus.
• Fill the Frame: Don't stand so far back that only 10%-20% of the frame is faces.  Move up close and look at your screen as a guide.  I will always crop out legs and shoes, and if this leaves an image that is small, the quality will suffer.
• Send the biggest version you can: It's important.  ooga@shaw.ca is the address to send photo files to.  Don't send the one that takes up the least bandwidth, it will look blurred on a screen if the resolution is lowered beyond a reasonable level.
• Identify!: I need to know who the people are and what they did.  If they won an event, tell me which one and first names from left to right in the photo will suffice (I can get the rest from the data I am sent).  I'd also like to credit the photo taker, so tell me who you are as well.
• Watch the lighting and background: At night, photos taken in the dark may not look too well and require touchup.  The playing area is usually best for light.  I have taken a lot of photos that seem to have trees coming out of the tops of people's heads, so avoid that if you can, although now that all photos will appear online in colour (as opposed to monochrome on paper), this is not as big an issue as it used to be.  Leavenworth has some great outdoor scenes that would make great photos: if your team goes out for dinner, take a photo of the team somewhere and send it along if you win!  Simple is usually best, against a wall inside the playing area, or even in a space in the middle with people milling around a distance away can sometimes work.
• Patience: There's a lot to do at scary hours during a Daily Bulletin week, and it may take a day or two before I can get around to posting photos.  Or responding to those who have sent them.

The Table Counts page simply has a spreadsheet with table counts and event types which can be used as a nice visual schedule to the different types of events, as well as to track the attendance of the tournament.  If you are one of the many who ask me whether attendance is up or down every day, this is the page you should bookmark!  This is a pdf of a large spreadsheet and will depend on your pdf displaying software.  I should mention that several things combined last year to make a huge turnout, and with Regionals in Victoria and Vancouver in the past ten weeks it seems likely that attendance will be down this year, but perhaps I will be wrong about that!

Finally, the ACBL Live Results link goes to the list of tournament events, from which you will need another click or three to find the specific event you want.  Direct links are available from the event reports on the daily pages and will be faster.

Thanks for visiting!  This is still a work in progress and the progress in getting it where I want it to be is quite slow, but there's quite a nice new look from what I was producing in Penticton last year (for which I must thank Google Fonts, Python, and several good sources of HTML5 and CSS material).  Feel free to contact me (see above) with reports of errors or if something isn't working for you.