Deal Of The Week: August 30, 2024
At a local game where I have an open section and an enthusiastic newcomers section, several of the learners told me that they had heard from Norma Doucette, at the Bridge Centre newcomer game, where she had said something about my recent trip to Toronto for the 2024 North American Bridge Championships. I‘m sure she was quite complimentary but the impression some of the players got was wildly overstated! I was happy enough with the introduction I got in Toronto by the ACBL‘s Director of Tournament Operations, Mackenzie Myers, who introduced me to someone as “the best Director in Vancouver.” That‘s quite enough for me. Canada-wide, there are a lot of great ones, and I‘ve benefited from great mentoring from several world-class Directors in the Pacific Northwest. I was in Toronto because whenever the North American Bridge Championships come to Canada (there are three of them a year, held over eleven or twelve days of play), most Canadian Directors are invited, since with only a few exceptions, we are not allowed to work in the USA, and this is a good experience for us, working at a tournament that is several magnitudes larger that most of the ones we work at home.
This was my second time at the NABC and the last one was also in Toronto, in 2017, also in July. Back then we were still selling entries in cash! Several Directors for each event were assigned as sellers, and they reported to the Finance Office an hour before gametime, where a dozen or more counters were mesmerized by the colours of Canadian bills. We were handed an old box that probably contained duplicate boards in the 1950s. Inside was enough change and bills to handle the sale and several different coupons and the EIC (Event In Charge) would hand us entries to sell. Once everyone had entries and the game started, we would leave these boxes locked in cabinets and they would be picked up. Nobody ever had any idea if their sale was accurate or not. All that has now been replaced by “the Square,“ the portable credit card sales gadget, and tablets; the finance office now has only one person in it, whose main job is to collect tablets and Square units and ensure that enough are charged for the next group of sellers. The army of people in the finance office have a new job now, manning the Entry Express stations to get people used to the even newer way of buying an entry: online, in advance!
If you were assigned to be an EIC (which in 2017 I was not) you would need to do the postgame computer work to ensure all scores were correctly entered, then take the file on a USB stick to the tournament office (some distance away in a large convention centre with a dozen or more different playing areas) and hand it in, along with a note saying which event it was and what the attendance was. These would then be added to the pile and eventually to a computer with all of the events, and eventually to the Internet with results. In 2024 we transfer files through the cloud and the EIC, or one of the other Directors assigned to the game, posts the game to ACBL Live minutes after the last scores are in, and then again later if corrections come in.
This time, somewhat to my surprise I had two events at which I was the assigned EIC; an evening Side Game which I ran solo, and the next morning and afternoon‘s slate of Regional Pair events, for which I had a group of four or five directors covering almost a hundred tables and two separate events. The evening game was the final event on Hazel Wolpert Day, named for a fine Toronto-based player who has won the Canadian Championship many times and now has a son Gavin who is a professional player and teacher based in Florida. The entire Wolpert clan played in the game, including grandchilden less than 12 years old, and everyone had a wonderful time. The kids, after four rounds of bridge, were instructed by Gavin to work off their pent-up energy by running a lap of the playing area, of which our 12 tables was a tiny part. Off they went, and I think they did two laps before returning to play the second half. The next day, the much larger event went smoothly until we were told that the strats were set up wrong! It took me several tries before getting the correction right, but only the guru in the office noticed (I think).
For the rest of the week I was one of the group of Directors and assigned to different spots each day. Toronto in July is hot and muggy, and the Convention Centre has three levels: a lower one which is quite cool, a street level that is a little warmer but has enclosed ballroom sized playing areas where the A/C works well, and the main playing area upstairs is quite warm, especially when 300 tables of players suddenly arrive for the next session. As a floor Director, you take most of the usual Director calls, and you sometimes get more difficult ones that you reserve judgment on and take to a more experienced TD, after getting as many pertinent facts as you can. In 2017 I wasn‘t very good at this, but I have improved since then. Unlike 2017, where I escaped the prospect of having to write something up, I had no less than three rulings this time that might be appealed and I needed to carefully fill out the form. Here there was some amazing new technology that came into play.
On the lower level, a room was filled with 16 table sections, A thru N, but a bank of airport-style cameras, the black half-spheres, were set up on a tall pedestal in the middle of sections E and J, limiting those to 13 or 14 tables only. These cameras recorded activity at each table in the room, and on two occasions I watched the action that took place before I was called, to confirm timing, and in one case whether a bid-card nearly played was visible by partner. (We concluded that partner could see that it was a bid, but not what the bid actually was.) Players, even when unhappy with the ruling made, seem to appreciate the fact that the cameras can be used in this way. When players tell a Director what happened it can often be unintentionally skewed in the player‘s favour.
The other thing that goes into rulings at this level quite often is a poll of other players. One pair got to game after two inviting calls that took 40 and 50 seconds, and the opponents called the Director, and I was the lucky one who responded. The procedure is to find players of a similar level playing a different event with different deals, give them the auction, without infractions or hesitations, and ask their opinion. If a significant minority, in a 'clean' auction, consider passing rather than bidding, pass may be a logical alternative and the bid made at the table after the hesitation might not be allowed. But another question needs to be asked next: we tell them about the hesitation and ask if a hesitation makes any considered call more or less likely to be chosen. In this rare case, almost half the people I polled thought they might pass without the hesitation. But all of these good players also said clearly that the hesitation did not affect their decision, did not indicate bidding more or less; what partner‘s problem had been was a complete guess: partner could have the top of the range or the bottom of the range, or be concerned about something else entirely. In the end, the ruling was to keep the original score and the non-offenders eventually appealed this decision, after a pleasant conversation with me. The appeal asked for more polling and another Director polled even more good players and got similar results, so my ruling was upheld!
I met several names one often sees in the ACBL Bulletin, including the associate editor who printed our local story about the bid-boxes, and several world-class players. Often I would find out after making a ruling or getting the basic facts that the players were famous bridge names! The ruling above had four very well-known names and when I took the initial call I did not know any of them, but when I went downstairs to look for people to poll, the Directors there said I might not find many good enough and sent me back to the event I was assigned to! Later, one player in the high-pressure Fast Pairs, with five minutes per board and automatic penalties for finishing a round late, did not at all like my reasonable explanations for what his opponent had done, and I mentally counted the money I was going to see on my paycheck while he ranted at me for several minutes. I said I‘m sorry we disagree, and told him about his options to report the incident, and rejoiced later when I was not assigned to day two of that event! But for the most part, players respected me (and one another) as much as I respected them, and I think overall I did kind of OK this time.
Overall, it was fun, exhausting, educational work. One player even recognized my name from an article I wrote a quarter-century ago on slow play and posted online (www.blakjak.org/splay.htm) which has since gotten me requests for reprints in four continents! I missed out on an NABC in Montreal in 2020 (thanks, COVID...) but I cannot wait for the next Canadian one!
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