The advantage of an early win was retirement to the
bar, and then to kibitz the Spingold.Alex and I decided that we'd like to experience some bridge outside of this country and targeted the Washington NABC in 2002 for a couple of reasons: location, time of year, and the Summer NABC (like the Spring event) is focused on IMP events rather than MPs or Point-a-Board. We arranged flights over the Internet, and a hotel room in the event's hotel through the ACBL also over the Internet.
As we were going as a pair, I emailed the event's Partnership Chair to ask about finding teammates. Luckily, and I must say this was key to our experience, he put us in touch with one of his team of volunteers who were running the event, David Rodney. David, an ex-pat who used to play on the tournament scene here many years ago, invited us to join his Spingold team of four and this team formed the basis for most of our bridge over the week.
So Alex and I flew out on the Friday and started by playing with two of our new teammates on the Saturday afternoon in the third KO bracket. A new set of KO brackets start every day with each bracket consisting of 16 teams, and the event lasts for two days - if you lose in the first two rounds on the first day, then you can start a new bracket on the following days. Brackets are ranked according to masterpoints, so in theory teams should be of similar standard. Earlier this year I'd emailed the ACBL for an EBU-masterpoint conversion formula, as we were keen to play at a sensible level, and luckily this seemed to be fairly reliable.
We were in the middle of the third division and comfortably won our first 24-board match. On Saturday evening we won again, although we needed to recover from a 1-46 IMPS position after the first 12 boards to win by a single IMP. On Sunday afternoon we lost the bracket semi-final and so took the evening off to do a little sightseeing.
One of the reasons that our teammates were happy to have a team of six was due to their workload as volunteers running the event. We had the transportation organiser plus chief and secondary barmen in the team, so they tended to use us as their anchor pair over the week.
On the Monday we playing in the first round of the Spingold, a 64-board knockout match against a team consisting of two clients and two pros. Alex still believes that we had a winning card, but we eventually lost by ~80 IMPS. Teammates were unlucky in their decision making and the pros had all the work to do in the first three quarters and this made the difference. We had rapidly established a good rapport with our teammates and they would have been happy to rotate around us, but in the end we played three of the sets to ensure that everyone had a fair crack of boards.
So on Tuesday we entered a fresh set of the KOs, this time as a
team of six. This time we were in the second bracket, mainly
because 64 good teams were still in the Spingold. The first two
matches were won easily, the quarter-final with our opposition
resigning when they were 73 IMPS down at the half (12-boards) -
in fact, one of their team wanted to quit as he left our table
without needing to score up! As Alex said, these teams had
masterpoints were more lifetime achievement awards
The advantage of an early win was retirement to the
bar, and then to kibitz the Spingold.
On the Wednesday we sailed through the semi-final and won the final in the evening. The final swung on the hand in problem #3, when their declarer failed to guess who to play for a 4-1 diamond break.
On Thursday we played in the IMP Pairs, another major national event at this tournament. Despite being +25 after the first 26-board qualifying round, we had a poor second round and did not qualify for the final. This was a combination of poor play, unlucky decisions and opponents playing surprising well against us and we would have had to have played extremely well to qualify, and when we didn't it just meant that we missed the final by some margin.
Our early exit from the IMP Pairs meant that we could have a day off and could do some proper sightseeing on Friday, so we abandoned the hotel and did some of the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument and other sights. In the evening we kibitzed the Spingold quarter-finals, watching Zia and Rosenberg lose by 9 IMPS to a Swedish/Danish team (who had beaten Forrester/Robson/Shugart/Brogeland by a single IMP the night before). Rosenberg was card perfect but a couple of bidding decisions cost them in the end.
Our flight times for Sunday meant that we could not enter the last major events that started on the Saturday, so rather than play in some minor event in the afternoon we watched our Swedish/Danish friends take on the Jacob (Jacobs, Katz, Versace, Lauria, Bocchi, Duboin) in the semi-final. In the end Jacobs won by 10 IMPS, but it was a pretty amazing performance from the original #56 seeds (we had been #77) to get so far, especially as a four-bagger.
For fun we played in the Saturday evening open swiss (4 x 6-board matches) with one of our original teammates and his wife. The standard was not particularly high and we won comfortably in the end, getting our second $0.25 bookmark of the week. There is ZERO prize money at these events, and you pay per session of bridge - $13 for most sessions and $15 for the major events like the Spingold.
Almost everyone we met was extremely pleasant to play against and very welcoming. We've exchanged email addresses with a number of people we played against (as well as teammates of course) and I have recruited more OKBridge members for my online team. We were able to play our normal system (Multi 2D and Ekren 2H) in all events save the open swiss, although we needed to provide written ACBL-approved defences.
The size of the event is staggering, with many options for events to play in. We found that entering the major events, and then dropping into the KO teams, provided us with the bridge we were looking for and a reasonable standard - our only major disappointment was not getting through a couple of rounds of the Spingold.
Although we generally played more consistently than our teammates, we were happy that we had found a team who were keen to have us play, and one that we got on with extremely well - our philosophy of bridge being enjoyable rather than winning being the only option served us well. It was the first time that we've played as a team of six and I was surprised at how fresh this kept us. Playing lots of bridge as a team of four, say at the Spring Fours, generally leaves everyone tired after a couple of days whereas we could probably have kept playing indefinitely when we were getting the odd session break - all we need to do now is find another pair for our regular team!
I'm sure that we'll be making this a semi-regular trip if we can. The Spring and Summer NABCs offer us the best option as they focus on IMPs, whereas the Fall NABC is Point-a-Board. The locations for 2003 are not that exciting, so it may be Spring 2004 (Reno) or Summer 2004 (New York) if I can get a pass from Hels.
We met a few other aliens - Shireen Mohandes was there with Andy Bowles and Malcolm Pryor (they lost in the Spingold 1st round too) and we were drinking late into the morning with Ian Kidger on the last night.
I think we were most fortunate in linking up with the people that we did, as being involved with the organisers meant that we were introduced to loads of people and we certainly felt part of the tournament.
If you have the time and the money, I'd certainly recommend going along to an NABC - we will be!
This page was last updated on October 4, 2005
© 1999-2005 P S Gipson
