The 2023 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 central and 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 an alternate route is Highway 3 from Hope to Princeton, east to Keremeos, then north on 3A to Kaleden and then north to Penticton. From the north Okanagan and eastern BC, 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, some close by, others near the northern beachfront, and 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 several 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 doorways, so let's do our best to stay on the right side of that one.

COVID: ACBL and District policy reccommends, but no longer requires, that all players to be fully vaccinated. District policy is that masks are optional but players should expect to possibly be asked to wear one if requested by the opponents. Just as some players are more uncomfortable with strong scents, some have serious concerns about the closeness of players at the table, and courtesy dictates that we do our best to accomodate both. Please co-operate if asked: masks will be available for those without one on hand.

Let's use common sense and remember that while we are all happy to see the end of the mandatory restrictions, COVID is still out there. Players should stay away from the crowded playing areas when symptoms suddenly develop that might be COVID. Most pharmacies have covid testing kits available for free if you'd like to be sure before you play. At the same time, let's not ostracize anyone who sneezes or coughs a time or two and trust that they are being as vigilant as we all should.

Slience Those Ringtones Please! While we discuss courtesy (which I have always found in abundance with Okanagan players in many pleasant visits), let's be sure to silence our gadgets. For today's cellphones this means more than simply setting the volume to zero: some phones play alarms and ringtones even if the sound is turned down. ACBL has recently relaxed the rules on penalties when a ringer goes off, but this shouldn't be happening. The onus is on each of us to discover how to prevent our gadgets from causing unnecessary distractions — not just cellphones: tablets you carry with you, watches that beep every hour, music players that sound a few tones every time they pair with headphones, gadgets you've left inside a coat somewhere, all can be major distractions to someone trying to recall the auction or the cardplay or the conventions partner has forced on them. Take a moment and find out how to silence your gadgets, and get into the habit of doing it before each session, and undoing it afterwards. If you must be 'available,' vibrate mode is entertaining to all (as long as it is set to a level that avoids the production of penalty cards...)!

Dates, Times, Events, Fees: 9:00 am, 1:00 pm, and 7:00 pm are the start times from Tuesday thru Friday. The tournament begins on Monday June 12 at 7:00 pm, with a Monday-Tuesday Knockout Teams, an Open Pairs which is the first in the Evening Side Game Series but has been quite large in the past, and a 299er Pairs. ALERT: On Saturday, June 17, there are only two sessions, at 10:00am and 3:00pm, so make your late Saturday dinner reservations at your favourite Penticton eatery in advance, since many hungry bridge players will be released early Saturday evening! On Sunday, June 18, play begins at 9:00 am with a stratified two-session Open Swiss Teams, a Bracketed 0-2000 Swiss Teams, and a Fast Open Pairs, as well as a Morning single session 299er Swiss Team event. Sessions should end 3¼ - 3½ hours after they begin, on Sunday things should end by about 5:15pm, possibly earlier, and considerably earlier in the Fast Pairs.

Morning Sessions from Tuesday to Saturday have two pair events: the Morning Side Game Series (open pairs), and a 299er Pairs game, with a Thursday-Friday morning Bracketed Swiss Teams that may actually fly this year. (A second daily 299er Pairs single session game goes Tuesday-Saturday afternoon, and there is one Evening 299er game on Wednesday.) On Saturday the Open and Gold Rush events start in the morning, alongside the Morning and Afternoon Side Game and the 299er Pairs. The main sessions from Tuesday-Friday are afternoon and evening, with new afternoon-evening Knockout Teams starting on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. (The Friday-Saturday Knockout Teams is afternoon-evening on Friday, then morning-afternoon on Saturday.) Knockouts in Penticton are played traditional style with brackets of 9-16 teams playing head-to-head or three-way matches. For teams not advancing there are single session Swiss Teams on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evening, Saturday afternoon, and also a two-session Bracketed Round-Robin Swiss Teams on Wednesday afternoon/evening and another on Saturday morning/afternoon (which means there are two team events starting at 1pm on Wednesday, a Wednesday-only Bracketed Swiss and a knockout that could go until Thursday evening if you reach the final). There is also a Zip Knockout Teams on Thursday evening starting at 10:30pm where the winners will be decided in the wee hours of the morning! Each day from Tuesday thru Saturday has a two-session Open and Gold Rush Pairs, and a game in the Morning, Afternoon and Evening Side Game Series, except that the Evening series begins Monday evening and concludes Friday evening, while the others begin on Tuesday and end on Saturday with the different start times. There are two single session 299er games (morning and afternoon) every day from Tuesday thru Saturday, as well as the Monday evening opener, a Wednesday Evening 299er game, and a morning single-session 299er Swiss Teams on Sunday.

Players in all games will need to have an ACBL number (even from a membership that has lapsed); those who have never had an ACBL number will need to obtain a free guest membership at this link. The per-session entry fee will have a $4 surcharge per session for players whose memberships have lapsed.

Entries will be cashless, on debit or credit card only please, and you can buy entries online at this link. For purchasing entries on site, directors will need to know for pairs and knockout teams an approximate masterpoint total for your pair or team, and if you have more than four players on your team. This helps us ensure that no section or group of tables is significantly stronger than the others in a pair game, and helps us determine the brackets in a knockout (so be as accurate as you can, please). "We're A's" is insufficient since we usually try to place the best of the A-strat in certain spots so the opposing pairs don't face you all in consecutive rounds! If you buy online, all this information will be auto-recorded once you enter the names of the players on your pair or team and you can skip the line and proceed straight to the table indicated in an e-mail you will get on the morning of the game. Online entries can be purchased until midnight the day before.

Welcome back to Live Bridge!: This will be the sixth District 19 Regional since the return to live bridge, and all of us have returned to live bridge at our own pace, which means that some will be new to live bridge. As I have noted in a two-part essay on the Monday and Tuesday pages, this is a bigger hurdle than some of us expected after two or three years of having the computers score for us, move us to new tables automatically, remove the hubbub from surrounding tables, and prevent us from the most common irregularities. Let's welcome those returning (we need them!) and understand if they are a little slow as they re-learn the basics of live play.

This Web Site: Our plan for the Daily Bulletin site is to provide you with a quick daily digest of the events of the tournament, with links to ACBL Live for each event if you want the complete details and deals. I write (or create software that writes) simple HTML that should render well on computers, tablets, or phone screens of most sizes. 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 Today's 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, last year's winners, and a direct link to the ACBL Live results, which will be active following each session. Near the end of each page we will add a list of Tomorrow's Events, in the same format.

At the end of the day Director-In-Charge Matt Koltnow will send 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 remove the Today's Schedule section and add the day's results, in this order:

• Masterpoint Leaders at the end of the day (not including events that are not yet complete)
• Noteworthy News Items Received — tournament chair Marv Norden and other members of the Penticton organizing team will have messages and you'll see them interspersed throughout, with the heavy double purple rounded border and a separate typeface to let you know this is official info!
• Two Session Pair Games: Open Pairs, Gold Rush Pairs
• Two Session Swiss or Bracketed Teams
• Single Session Swiss Teams
• Completed Knockouts
• Rosters for Surviving Teams in Knockouts that are not yet complete
• Side Games
• Side Game Series Leaders
• 299er Pairs

New This Time: most events will include, just after the overall leaders, a colourful round-by-round account of the top pairs in each strat: where you were after each round, what you did, how far you were from the lead. There is much more on this new feature here.

Once a day's results are posted, I may revise it later if there are late scoring corrections. Some browsers save a copy of a page and do not check to see if the content has changed; in most browsers you should be able to hit F5 to reload the page and stop using the one your computer has saved. On tablets there is usually a circular arrow that does the same thing.

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 (although we may add some information later here; Penticton usually has a dedicated photo taker who sets up in the room where they give out the door prizes so you can't claim one for a win without getting your photo taken!). Now that everyone's cellphone has a camera, anyone can take a photo of winners for the Bulletin! 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, especially when I have daily Director duties that require a reasonable amount of rest, 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 has been rewritten from a pdf of a spreadsheet to a Python program that puts the attendance data into a colourful HTML table. You can check it out to see a graphical-display of the events of each session, by type, and compare our attendance in 2023 to that of 2022, the last time we were here. On the daily pages near the top we'll also be comparing current attendance to the 2019 attendance (3217½ tables!) before the hiatus and hoping to get to 60% of that lofty figure, making the target 1930 tables this time. Maybe we can do even better!

Finally, the ACBL Live link goes to the list of tournament events, from which you will need another click or three to find the one you want. Direct links for each event, even each bracket in the knockouts, are available from the event results on the daily pages and should be quicker.

Thanks for visiting! This is still a work in progress and the progress in getting it where I want it to be continues slowly, but that's web development for you! I did a lot of post-Victoria testing and the resulting new round-by-round leaderboards should be a unique and interesting new feature. Feel free to contact me (see above) with reports of errors or if something isn't working for you.