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Tuesdays, 7pm-9:30pm, $40/team SMILE takes place on Tuesday evenings at the Vancouver Bridge Centre, starting at 7pm and finishing around 9:30pm. Teams play (usually) four 6-board matches against four of the other teams (if there are only two or four teams, we will play three 8-board matches instead). Boards are preduplicated and scoring is on BridgeMates, so the 24 boards in three or four matches will be played first, and scored automatically. Teams that want to stay and pore over hand records can do so; teams wanting to hit the road as soon as the last board is entered are free to do so: the website will have complete results for all the matches by the time they get home, likely sooner. And...
Play often, sometimes, or seldom! The competition is set up to welcome new teams at any time, and to do our best with singles and pairs without teammates. There is a small advantage to playing as often as your team can, described in the details below, but not an overwhelming advantage.
Players of all levels welcomed! In addition to the standings of wins, losses and VPs, which will determine the masterpoint awards three times per year, there will also be a handicap standings table that adds a few IMPs per board to teams with fewer masterpoints, kept just for fun but perhaps with a few prizes thrown in.
A Year-Round Competition! SMILE is run under the Unit 430 Annual Extended Teams sanctions, which gives each unit three such sanctions every year. This means that three times per year, we add up all the results and send them in for masterpoints, creating three "seasons," Summer, Fall, and Spring. 17-20 weeks is a bit long if you get behind, so we'll divide the seasons into "segments" of 6-9 weeks and have two or three of them in a season, resetting to zero as each new segment begins.
Handicap Standings to Equalize Masterpoints We post two scores for each match and keep a separate standings table, one without and one with handicaps to the team with fewer masterpoints. This is meant to encourage newer players to come out and give it a try. You might not win many matches, but the handicap scores will show when you are covering the spread in masterpoints between your team and more experienced opponents.
Pairs is fun, but Teams is too! Don't be scared off by the team format. A team consisting of a pair playing the North-South cards and another playing the East-West cards is the purest form of duplicate bridge. You don't need to rely on other pairs for 'field protection' or take wild risks for overtricks. And that old idea that mistakes force you to apologize to three players instead of one is really silly: you're 50% less likely to be at fault in a four-person team than in a two-player pair, and the IMP scoring prevents any mistake from being completely unrecoverable.
Watch this website develop Just in time for the holiday season of 2023, McBruce has completed version 1.0 of the program that takes names, results, and boards and combines it all into an file that makes your browser or tablet screen look like a Christmas display! You can see the board by board results at the left: contracts and opening leads at both tables, and IMPs won, and look at the hand records on the right at the same time, with scroll bars to allow all of this information to fit into small windows big enough for one match or one deal. Check it out here!