The 2022 Whistler Regional Start Page

Gateway to masterpoints, results, photos

Alert: your browser may be showing you an old version of a page which is updated often. F5 (computer) or the ↻ button (phone or tablet) will get you the most recent version.

Basic Tournament Information

Location: Fairmont Chateau Whistler, 4599 Chateau Blvd., Whistler BC. Whistler was the co-host (with Vancouver) of the 2010 Winter Olympics. The 2010 games were the third held in Canada and were a great success, both in attendance and coverage, as well as in unprecedented success for the Canadian team, which, after failing to win a single gold medal in two prior Olympic games on home soil, won a Winter Games record 14 gold medals!

Driving: there are two ways to drive to Whistler: by far the easiest way is north from Vancouver on Highway 99.  Highway 1 crosses through East Vancouver before going over Burrard Inlet into North Vancouver, where the road continues past the ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay, and on northward through Squamish and on to Whistler.  Be sure to watch the signs as you go along the Upper Levels Highway over West Vancouver and stay on Highway 99, avoiding getting into the ferry lineup at Horseshoe Bay, which is the continuation of Highway 1 to Vancouver Island.

The difficult way to drive to Whistler is the Lillooet - Pemberton - Whistler route, which can be a major adventure in late October and November if the weather is extreme.  I've survived this ride a handful of times in my travels at former jobs but I wouldn't be in much of a state to play bridge after coming through this in a storm...

When you get to Whistler, turn right at Lorimer Road (left if you came from the difficult route) and continue on through the first Blackcomb Way to the second Blackcomb Way (a winding road) and turn right, then left onto Chateau Blvd and into the main entrance of the Fairmont.

If you miss the Lorimer Road turnoff, the next one northbound (Nancy Greene way) will work: a quick right onto Blackcomb Way will get you back to Lorimer Road.  If you miss Lorimer Road going south, the next exit is left onto Village Gate Blvd, left again onto Blackcomb Way and right onto Lorimer Road.

Transit: Whistler Transit's 5 route goes fairly close to the playing site, a stop beyond the Gondola Transit Exchange.  Several companies offer downtown Vancouver or Airport bus connections to and from Whistler several times a day, and a search engine will find these for you easily.

Restaurants and Shops: The Fairmont has several restaurants and shops and there are several more within walking distance (bring a sweater or winter jacket, Whistler can be chilly in the fall!); plus, there are several dozen more a short drive away in various parts of Whistler and Blackcomb.

Tournament Site: The playing area is on the north end of the Fairmont (left as you drive into the main entrance) on the main floor.  As always, entry selling spots, hospitality and partnership desks, and bridge supplies and books will take up space just outside the playing area.

Dates, Times, Events: Lots of changes here from previous versions, read carefully please! The most obvious change is the switch from Monday-Sunday to a rare regional that begins on Thursday (November 3) and ends on a Wednesday (November 9), a change requested by the host hotel. Start times are 2pm and 7pm on Thursday's opening day, then 10am and 3pm for the main events from Friday thru Tuesday. Wednesday, the final day, also has a 10am start time with a second session TBA. The Sunday session in the middle also has a mostly-teams setup, with the two-session pair games taking a day off (there are Side Games oin Sunday for those wishing to play one session only). Along with the 7pm second session on the first day, there are two evening events beginning at 7:30pm: a Friday-Saturday Evening Round-Robin Teams, and a Semi-Fast Side Game Series on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evening. All evening events will be shorter sessions of 18-21 boards, and a quick pace of play.

Knockout Teams happen on Thursday-Friday (Thursday's start times are different, see above), Saturday-Sunday, and Monday-Tuesday. All three Knockout Team events are mini-Soloway style, where the first day will be a Swiss or Round-Robin within each bracket to qualify four teams for the semi-finals that begin on Day Two. All semifinal teams will play two full matches on Day Two; semifinal losers must play for a clear third/fourth place (unless the bracket began with nine or more teams). If a bracketed knockout or round robin team event is only one bracket, a knockout will become a handicap knockout (based on team masterpoints) and a round-robin teams will be stratified.

Pair games for non-Life Masters continue to be a tough draw at most tournaments, but the almost-daily Gold Rush 0-750 game will have under-400 and under-200 strats, and the Saturday schedule includes two single session 0-200 games.

The Table Counts page has a list of events by type with a column for each session of the tournament: even before I begin adding the table counts for each event it is a useful chart to plan which events to play. The official tournament flyer with the complete schedule is here

COVID Vaccination Required: All players must be fully vaccinated to play, and lanyards will be supplied as you arrive the first time; after your first visit, simply show your wrist band as you enter the playing area. Canada removed all former border COVID restrictions on October 1. Masks are optional at tables but courtesy asks that everyone have one with them in case a player prefers that all players at a table wear masks during a round.

This Web Site: My plan for the Daily Bulletin site is to provide you with a quick daily digest of the events of the tournament, with direct 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. The site consists of a group of pages linked together by links bars like this one:

If you ever lose the entry spot to the tournament pages, there is a link from the District 19 website ( d19.org ) and from my own simple website ( mcbruce.ca ).

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
• Morning-only Single Session 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.

At the end of the day Director-In-Charge Matt Koltnow will send me the days results and I will process them into the website in the early hours of the morning. The "day completed" version will replace the schedule section with 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 from members of the Whistler organizing team will have messages and you'll see them interspersed throughout, with the heavy double light blue rounded border and a distinctive typeface to let you know this is official info!
• Two Session Pair Games: Open Pairs, Gold Rush Pairs
• Two Session Swiss or Bracketed Teams
• Completed Knockouts
• Rosters for Surviving Teams in Knockouts that are not yet complete
• Side Games
• Side Game Series Leaders
• 299er Pairs (Saturday only)

Some of the comments I write about how the event leaders emerged comes from software I am working on to track everyone's scores round by round. In a pairs game this is a bit different from the one-round-to-go posted leaderboards: I figure if you get what eventually is scored as two top boards in round one, you are leading at that point, even though it will take twelve more rounds before your tops are fully confirmed by other scores when those boards are played later at other tables.

Once a day's results are posted, I may revise it later if there are late scoring corrections. Many 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, or a swipe down will reload the latest version.

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. Whistler 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, putting 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 2022 to that of 2019, the last time we were here. If we get close to that attendance level we'll be extremely well. A more realistic goal is about 55% of the 2019 attendance, which happens to be a target of 758 tables. 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 are available from the event results on the daily pages and should be faster.

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! For this Welcome page, I used a lush green and a super-light blue to reflect the green surroundings and the way the Whistler clear sky reflects off snowfall. We have a lot more colour in the pages this year, with each page having its own palette. Two years off and a look at what I did in 2019 produced the impression that we needed a splash of non-white for the pages, and a bit of CSS work made this happen quickly. (I've already heard the line that it now looks like a Canadian billfold and I approve!) Feel free to contact me (see above) with reports of errors or if something isn't working for you.