As an ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) Club and Tournament Director, I get assignments to work at many tournaments, mostly in this area, but sometimes on the Island or in the Okanagan or occasionally beyond. For someone new to bridge it may sometimes seem like a hallucinogenic dream to imagine yourself playing in an actual bridge tournament, but you're already closer than you think!
The ACBL (acbl.org) covers the USA, Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda, serving as the organizing body for bridge clubs and tournaments in those countries. Instead of playing for money prizes, most bridge players are content to play for what are known as masterpoints and the rankings that result from them. Players who have an active ACBL membership receive a mailed monthly bridge magazine (an online version is available to members), have their masterpoints at tournaments and club games recorded, and avoid the surcharges that non-members pay to play in tournaments. In every bridge game, about 40% of the pairs win some masterpoints; how many depends on the level and size of the game.
As I write this in December of 2019, our enthusiastic group of new players is playing about 8-10 boards in an evening as they get familiar with the game. I hope that we'll continue to play more boards as we get up to speed, and as soon as we get to three tables or more, we can actually award some small amount of masterpoints to the winners! Not only that, the three tables are credited to the main game, so masterpoint awards for the main game would be based on the main game's attendance plus three tables!
(And as I write this extra paragraph ten months later, the entire bridge world has been shutdown due to the COVID pandemic. Bridge has moved online and this has created interesting new ways to play but also brought new difficulties. We don't know at this point when the world about to be described will return, but it's still a good read.)
What comes next? Some of our new players might want to try the main game, or perhaps a game at another club. It will feel awfully rushed at first, but you'll struggle through. Your score may be low or surprisingly high—you'd be surprised how many times one's first full-length game goes better than expected—but after that first time, the Big Step, you'll probably want to try it again. Here are a few tips for that first Big Step:
Once you have played a few club games you'll start hearing about tournaments. It will seem like an even bigger step than the decision to try a full-length club game was, but you'll be even more surprised here. Tournaments are mostly just very large club games. They are large enough so that usually more than one event is going on. Some of these events will have masterpoint limits, so that you can play in an event without the area's best players in it. Unit 430 runs a few single day sectional tournaments each year for players under 100 masterpoints, and a few more two-day sectional tournaments each year for non-Life Masters (a rank requiring 500 masterpoints). As well, there are four weekend-long sectional tournaments each year open to all, but with some limited events. It's all bridge, with bigger games and larger awards.
But it doesn't end there. A step up from sectional tournaments, run by the local Unit, is regional tournaments, which are run by the local District. ACBL District 19 covers B.C., Washington State (except for the other Vancouver), and Alaska. The June regional in Penticton each year is a tournament, Canada's largest, that has to be seen to be believed. The site is Penticton's huge Trade and Convention Centre, where almost 400 tables are set up, 200 in the pairs area and 200 more in the teams area. By the end of the week-long (Monday evening through to Sunday late afternoon) tournament, the final attendance is usually well over 3,000 tables! Similar tournaments of about 1400-1600 tables are held every August in Lynnwood WA, north of Seattle, and every April in Victoria or Burnaby. A smaller Fall Regional alternates between Leavenworth WA, a city two hours east of Seattle done up to look like a Bavarian town, Olympia WA, and Whistler, where the weeks before the ski season opens gets bridge players good hotel rates.
In addition to pair games, regionals have many other events: one of the coolest is bracketed knockout teams. You find a second pair and enter as a four-person team, and tell the entry seller how many masterpoints your team members have. In Penticton perhaps 110 teams (440 players!) will enter on Tuesday afternoon, and the directors will assign every team to a table to start a match against another team. Later it becomes clear that the 110 teams have been divided into brackets of 14-16 teams each, based on their masterpoint total, so the other teams in your bracket will be close to your level. If you win your match on Tuesday Afternoon, you play another Tuesday Evening. Win that one and you're into the final four on Wednesday Afternoon, and if you win that you're into the final on Wednesday Evening. Each time you win, more masterpoints come your way, and even the lowest bracket pays the winner about twenty times what a club game winner wins. If you lose, no problem: your team can play in the evening Swiss Teams, or can split up and play pairs, before lining up the next afternoon, when another bracketed knockout teams begins!
There is, believe it or not, one more level in the tournament world. The ACBL itself runs three huge North American Bridge Championships every year, in March, July, and November, eleven days of bridge spanning two weekends!. Vancouver hosted the Spring 1974 and Spring 1999 NABCs. I was assigned to work the last seven days of the 2017 Summer NABC in Toronto, at the Convention Centre downtown. I arrived for the first time the day before I was working, by taking the raised walkway connecting Union Station to Rogers Centre, so I came in from above. I looked down and saw two areas with about 150 tables each, then a brick wall. Descending an escalator, I saw behind the wall 300 more tables in two more areas! This was the top level of the Convention Centre ... and there were two more below!
Best bridge story ever: If you have ever heard poker players discuss hands you will not be surprised to know that at a bridge tournament the same thing happens a magnitude higher. With everyone in pairs games playing the same deals at roughly the same time, and anyone who wishes one getting a hand record when the game ends, the restaurants near any large tournament are filled with bridge players loudly discussing their exploits. And whereas Texas Hold'Em players are dealt just two cards, we are dealt thirteen and have to account for 39 more, which makes the stories much more diverse! Here is a reconstruction of the deal in the story: you're in 7NT and you need to find the Q♣ to make all the tricks.
It seems like a 50-50 shot, you can finesse either opponent for the missing Q♣. Read on.
Any discussion of the tournament world needs to include this amazing story which happened in 1983 at the Sacramento Regional and involves the best pairs player in history, a fellow named Barry Crane. Crane was a TV director who would make sure his shows wrapped days in advance so he could fly to Regional tournaments and play for the final two or three days. (You can still see Crane's work on TV shows of the late 1960s and 1970s like Mannix and Mission:Impossible.) Even on such a limited schedule Crane was a perennial favorite in the annual race for most masterpoints won in a year, and when he couldn't win, he did his best to make sure his friends did and his enemies did not, by deliberately showing up at the tournaments where his presence would affect the final standings the most!
The Sacramento Regional in 1983 was held in a site with two levels, one on top of the other, stairs connecting the levels surrounding the playing area. Grant Baze, a California expert, was Crane's partner and was playing a hand in 7NT with Crane as dummy. With 12 top tricks, Baze was going to have to guess the location of the queen of clubs to make the contract.
Baze: "Barry had several superstitious rules that he followed always, and his partners better follow them or all hell would break loose. One of these was that if you had a two-way guess for a queen, you did not have to think about it — the queen was over the jack in the minors, and under the jack in the majors. So if you held Axxx and dummy had the KJ109, you would lay down the ace and lead to the jack if the suit was a major, and lead to the king and finesse coming back if the suit was a minor. Barry and I wind up in 7NT and that was our club holding, with only 12 top tricks. No problem, I'm thinking to myself, I will not be able to get a count on the hand so I will just follow Barry's rule; if it does not work at least he will keep his mouth shut."
However, when Baze cashed a few of the side suits, the splits were extreme and he was able to count out the distribution:
The Crane play was anti-percentage knowing that one opponent had three clubs and the other only two. Baze knew that his play was correct but would go against Crane's well-known rule. He held his breath and played it his way, cashing three hearts, leading to the K♣ and continuing with the jack. When East followed low, Crane also played low...
Now, the strange geography of the room, and the way tournament directors seed the field by placing the top pairs at the same table numbers in different sections within the same event, all well-known to players who had played all week and knew the layout, provided some wild action!
Baze: "Meanwhile, at the same time, downstairs in another section, Mike Smolen is playing this hand at the same moment; he knows he and I are playing this hand simultaneously. Mike also gets a count on the hand, but decides to follow Barry's rule. Sure enough, the queen was doubleton and Mike makes the hand. Mike knows I am going to guess the hand the technically correct way, regardless of Barry's superstitions. Mike tells his partner, "Listen closely, you are about to hear an explosion from upstairs..." How right he was! I misguessed the queen and Barry went ballistic, screaming like a lunatic and then running out of the room!"
Yes, the world's best pairs player, running up and down all the stairs in sequence screaming that "my partner is a complete idiot!" probably would not be tolerated at any tournament today. It was a different time. Baze also claims that Crane eventually sat back down and deliberately threw the next six boards, resulting in them losing by the smallest of margins. Whatever. I love the idea that at some point in some place, a player was able to tell his opponents that something whacky was about to occur directly above them — and it did!
Crane's effect on the yearly masterpoint race created friends and enemies and in 1985 he was killed in his home in Los Angeles, a crime that was unsolved until last year, when DNA and fingerprint analysis revealed that the killer was a man completely unrelated to Crane who did not remember the incident nor even most of the decade. After his death, the ACBL renamed the annual race in his honor, but it has ceased to be much of a race: by June it is usually clear which top player has decided to make a run for it.
Previous: BBB#2: How Duplicate Scoring Works