THANKS, LYNN!

The all-too-sparse tournament schedule "up North" ended with Traverse City the weekend after Labor Day. Lynn Larson again organized the Paul Christ Memorial Sectional at the VFW Hall on Veteran's Drive. The new venue is a big improvement over the last couple of years, with a brighter and larger room. That, plus the location was more central and closer to wide lunch options on Friday. The hospitality committee outdid themselves on baked goods and SMOKED FISH! For the first time in the last few years there were enough attendees to have a NLM pairs event both morning and afternoon. Since the facility has room to grow, maybe we can all try to play a bit more there next year.

PETOSKEY WAS A WINNER!

Petoskey hosted an excellent (as usual) Sectional tournament in their beautiful building June 27-28. While there was space for a few more tables, the attendance was solid for the post-pandemic world. As we've come to expect, the tournament was smoothly run and hospitality was top-notch. Since the demise of the Regional tournament (also hosted by Petoskey) a few years ago, Petoskey early each Summer and Traverse City just after Labor Day are the only tournament competitions each year within hundreds of miles. HINT-HINT: SUPPORT THEM IF YOU WANT THEM TO SURVIVE! Putting on a tournament is a lot of work by bunches of volunteers.

DROPBOX TO THE RESCUE!

Dropbox is the way we receive our hand files from The Common Game. As the person who deals the boards for our club games, I've never explored their site beyond what I needed. It turns out, Dropbox ALSO LISTS CHANGES OF ACBL RANK! In the past the ACBC site hasn't announced rank changes, but that changes AS OF NOW.

On April 30 Anne Misiak earned the rank of Regional Master. Congratulations, Anne!

RAISING THE BAR?

Nancy DeWeese and Helen Davis each had over 1,000 master points. Achieving that status was a point of pride for Helen and happened only shortly before she passed away. It used to be really hard to earn 1,000 master points! A few years prior to the pandemic our small bridge club had exactly one regular player with over 500 master points... Judy Kulka. Hence Lou Slyker's habit of greeting her as "Madame Bronze Life Master Kulka." She was the only Life Master of any level in our club (except when Mary Ellen Nickodemus visited briefly each Summer). For a long time our games weren't stratified. That is, everyone competed for overall honors rather than being "2nd in A, 1st in B" or some such. There was no reason to separate players into different groups according to master point holdings, since NOBODY had very many. There were skill differences, of course. It just meant that players of limited skill or experience tended not to win master points very often.

Stratification is a valuable tool when clubs have players with wide ranges of skill and experience as expressed in master point holdings playing in the same game. Gradually ACBC players became more active in tournament play or in other local clubs. For a variety of reasons it became easier to win quite a few master points if a player was motivated to do so. It became practical to recognize the accomplishments of relatively inexperienced players who placed high in comparison with their peers even if they didn't win overall honors. Beginning about the time Nancy turned the club over to the current managers (or their predecessors) we decided to stratify our games to encourage fairer competition. Our 1st "A" stratification started at 200 master points! That still only included a handful of regular players. A few years ago we upped the minimum for A to 300.

We are still a small rural bridge club, so many of our players really don't have a chance to win a lot of master points in F2F play. There are, however, quite a few players in our club who have become somewhat active on the "tournament circuit" or online (since the pandemic). We now have a few players with 1,000+ master points and half a dozen more with 500+. Our current stratification levels of 300 for the low end of A and 100 for B have become out-of-date. To reflect this new reality our new A stratification applies to players with 500 or more master points. Our change parallels action by the ACBL to raise the minimum number of points for the rank of Life Master from 300 to 500. Our A strat will include quite a few players who lack some specific requirement for Life Master status.

Of course, regardless of your current stratification you still win overall awards if your percentage is good enough! This change will make it easier to form teams for an Eight is Enough team game, something we hope to offer regularly this Summer. Stratification of the Wednesday 199er game won't change. And there still will be ACBL-wide events where the stratification levels are dictated by the ACBL.