ACBL Director's Report
ACBL Director's ReportHello everyone,
Grand National Teams: I hope to see many of you next month at the District GNT event (details are in this issue). I would appreciate getting RSVPs from those of you who know you are playing, but reservations aren’t necessary to play.
This is a great event and a great chance to play in the national finals in Washington DC this summer. One team will qualify for each flight: C is less than 500 masterpoints and non-life master, B is less than 2000 masterpoints, A is less than 5000 masterpoints and there is an open flight. The event is 2, 3 or 4 sessions depending on how many teams enter each flight, but anyone who has to play more than two sessions will have qualified for the semi-finals and will win gold points, even in flight C. Each winning team that goes to DC for the finals will receive a travel award from District 8 to help cover your expenses.
We have yet another new site, the Riverton Eagles Club just outside of Springfield. We have signed a five-year contract with this facility for the GNTs, the NAPs and the Springfield Sectional, so this should be our last move for a while.
Houston NABC: The Board of Director meetings in Houston meeting seemed to have a brief agenda, but ending up running as long on the last day as a busy agenda does. We had both candidates for the World Bridge Federation presidency speak to us. Jose Damiani is stepping down after 16 years and a new era will begin. This will be my first meeting as a member of WBF Executive committee so I had to pay close attention. We also had a strategic planning session on Monday afternoon which was fruitful. We sent staff back to Memphis with some new programs to develop. The ACBL’s involvement with Internet bridge was a major topic. We are also still trying to develop a new rating system that measures current skill.
Membership numbers are good. There is a net increase in membership of over 700 members for 2009 so far which is encouraging.
The new national event, the Platinum Pairs, was scheduled for the first Friday, Saturday and Sunday of the Spring Nationals, starting in 2010. The Board of Governors passed a motion asking us to reconsider this. I had voted for the schedule since no one on the board raised any objections and I truthfully have no expertise in this area. Once we passed it, I started hearing about the problems. The main one is that there is also a nationally rated four-session Open Pairs on the same Friday and Saturday, and it would be greatly diluted by running the Platinum Pairs at the same time. I had noticed this, but again, accepted the schedule proposed by the committee in charge of this matter. I am willing to admit I was wrong and should not have voted for this motion.
Appeals and Charges had two hearings and passed some small changes to the Code of Disciplinary Regulations. We will be considering the proposed penalty sections at the DC meeting (unless we get too many hearings again to have time.)
Unit wide games no longer have to use identical hands. We are one of the districts whose STACs do not use hand records and were cited frequently in the discussion on this matter.
Shortened Club Championships will be allowed, with games of 12-17 boards paying 60% of the awards for regular club championships. The online regular club championship overall award is capped at 6 masterpoints. Tthe maximum award for the shortened championship is 4.5 masterpoints. I voted against this motion because I thought the award should be only 50%, not 60%
The motion to rename the Board of Governors was withdrawn, and the motion to have the ACBL required to maintain an extensive member database of all members with more than 5000 masterpoints or an NABC+ win, to archive major bridge events and to publish this information on our website was defeated. Much of this information may be available in the future as the ACBL is working on a new Encyclopedia of Bridge and may put some of its information on the website. The ACBL will also cooperate with any other organization that decides to take up these tasks.
Effective May 1, 2009, it is now a sponsor option at local, sectional and regional tournaments to stratify pair events based on the average masterpoints of the pair. It will be interesting to see how this works out. I know Unit 208 has been using it in the team games at their sectionals and it has been popular.
The ACBL is in negotiations to buy an existing building in the Memphis area to finish to our needs for our new headquarters. We should know in the next month or two if this is successful.
I look forward to seeing many of you May 2 and 3 at the Grand National Teams in Riverton IL.
-- Georgia
If you have questions or suggestions about ACBL Board actions or other bridge matters, please contact me at gkheth@hotmail.com or 917 S. Main St., Morton IL 61550-2419.