After 3 years, Unit 431 returned to tournament play with the Victoria Fall Sectional on September 16 to 18 at the Mary Winspear Centre.
The tournament was very successful thanks to the team of volunteers who worked to organize and pull off the event. Kudos are also due to Tournament Director Bruce McIntyre who masterfully ran the three-day sectional which attracted higher than expected turnout.
It was great to bring together our local players and welcome out of town visitors from up-island, the mainland and the US. The final tally for the weekend of 189 tables was 71% of the 2019 total, a phenomenal turnout! The main decrease in attendance was in the limited masterpoint, or non-life master games, which has been the case across other ACBL tournaments. A challenge across the bridge community is to continue to attract newer players to our clubs and tournaments.
Congratulations to Sandra and Doug Fraser, who, playing together all weekend, were the overall winners with 38.83 silver masterpoints.
You are chasing away the NLM players by making them play against the big guns and getting slaughtered. The big guns should play against one another, ie: 5000 points plus play against one another, 2000-4999 play against one another etc.
This would level the playing field and encourage NLM to come out to play at clubs and tournaments.
Yes – to Edmund’s comment – there were so few new players at Mary Winspear that there weren’t enough of us to create 2 tables! That was Saturday afternoon. We (with a total of 45 points between us) ended up playing in the Big Pool with the Big Guns! And there was a lot of “attitude” among some of them – like throwing each card played violently on the table and being rude to their partners – that sort of thing . . . I understand this is a “strategy” experienced players invoke to intimate but really? NOT fun.