ACBL Director's Report
ACBL Director's ReportHello District 8,
My San Diego report is a little late, but here are the highlights of November’s meeting.
The ACBL had 10,954 new members in 2009 as of October and total membership was up 3039 for the year. The new requirements to make life master only apply to members who join for the first time after December 31, 2009 or who let their membership lapse after the same time. This may account for some of the increase.
The new headquarters in Horn Lake MS (near the old headquarters in Memphis TN) is progressing nicely and the ACBL will be moving in during March 2010. Right now, they believe there will be disruptions in telephone and computer services between March 11 and 19, including periods with no website access. Please take this into account in March and be kind about any inconveniences. Here is the notice they will be posting soon:
IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING ACBL’S MOVE TO NEW LOCATION:
The ACBL staff is excited about our upcoming relocation. However, please be informed that beginning March 11th and ending on or about March 19th, the ACBL headquarters staff will not be able to receive or send email communications. In addition, various portions of the ACBL web site will be affected. You may not be able to renew memberships online, log into MyACBL, or upload and/or view club game results on the web site during this time. There may be brief interruptions of phone services as well. We do not anticipate any interruption to the ACBL web site home page. We suggest that you visit www.acbl.org often for any updates. Our IT Department will be working diligently to keep the technical issues to a minimum and we thank you in advance for your patience as we relocate to our new headquarters.
The League Counsel Report was interesting for the reason that for the first time since I have been on the board, and I believe for many years before then, there are no pending lawsuits against the ACBL.
Traditionally, the biggest item of the November meeting is the approval of the next year’s budget. That did not happen this year. The Board approved certain fee increases, including fees for short games (from 40 cents per table to 46 cents per table) and membership dues (an increase of $2 per year for most categories, $4 for household dues and $1 for juniors). Tournament director fees were increased to reflect rising costs that have not been captured for the past four years. A preliminary budget was approved, but the final budget will not be voted on until the March meeting. The first draft of the “final” budget (no budget is final until it has been passed by the Board) is due February 15.
There have been numerous changes to the ACBL Disciplinary Sanction Guidelines. If you are interested, please read them online where the entire Code of Disciplinary Regulations is posted. Three new offenses were created: (1) Attempting to influence a decision of a disciplinary body outside of the hearing process(es); (2) Discussion of the content of the hearing, other than the committee decision, outside the hearing room by a disciplinary body member (whether a party to the hearing or not); and (3) Cheating and similar ethical violations not specifically covered by other sections in Appendix B, Part A of the CDR. I think the first one is self-explanatory. The second has always been required by the CDR but was not a listed punishable offense. It is needed to protect the members’ privacy and the committee members and the ACBL from lawsuits for libel and slander. The third was needed by a growing trend of committees to find alleged cheaters not guilty when they could not find the specific offense listed in Appendix B, Part A of the CDR. We also had two hearings in San Diego.
Many motions did not pass. These included changing the Mini-Spingold team event to bracketed knockouts, allowing the number of strata in a stratified event to be increased to 5 and the number of flights in a flighted event to be increased to 5, removing the restriction that no more than 1/3 of the masterpoints needed to establish ACBL status level can be from online play, changing flight B in North American Pairs to 0-2500, forming a committee to examine changes to the relationship of clubs and Management, and adding a fourth flight of 0-5000 to the North American Pairs.
Motions regarding special games were deferred to the Spring meeting. A special committee was formed to make recommendations to the whole board. I was named to this committee and we will start meeting February 10. These are the games that are sectionally-rated, cost $1.00 per player additional, benefit either the International Fund, the Junior Fund, the Educational Foundation or the Charity Foundation, and can be run almost every session. They have given rise to what are known as triple-point games and triple-point clubs. In various parts of the ACBL, there are clubs that run only triple-point games. In areas where there are more than one club holding games at the same time (I know, wouldn’t it be nice!), this has caused great friction with clubs who don’t want to hold the games but have to in order to hold onto their players. It also gives rise to other problems, such as skewing masterpoint races in favor of players who have constant access to triple-point games and players realizing they have advanced out of the strata/flight they are comfortable playing in due to the sudden increase in the number of masterpoints awarded. Most of these are not pressing issues in District 8 – we have few, if any, games running special games every session. Very few of our players were ever able to compete in the nationwide Ace of Clubs races due to the small masterpoint awards in our games compared to those in Florida, Arizona and other areas with large games.
I feel that some of these issues should be decided by the marketplace – if your members want them, run them; if not, DON’T -- but I think there is room to change as well. I am president of the Board of Trustees of the Charity Foundation, which has benefited greatly from these games, but I don’t think this influences my opinion on this matter. Our duty is to give away the money we raise wisely, not raise more and more money. We increased the block grants given to the districts to award each year by 50% in November because of the increased donations, but we can go back to the old amount with no problem. It is important to note that the ACBL finances are not improved by these special games. All of the additional money raised goes to a fund or foundation. If anyone has views on this they would like to share with me, please email me at gkheth@hotmail.com (sooner rather than later, please.)
Provisions for handicapped team events were changed. Teams with an average masterpoint holding in excess of 5000 per member will no longer receive any handicap. The default method is that a team with a greater than 5000-point per member average will continue to give handicaps to teams with a less than 5000-point average on the basis of their actual average. A tournament may choose to treat all teams with an average of at least 5000 points per member as if their average was 5000.
The number of boards required for a Newcomer Game was reduced from 10 to 6. These games are frequently run in conjunction with a lesson and the 10-board minimum was making the combined session of lesson and game too long for the newcomers.
And finally, the Mini Blue Ribbon Pairs were increased to a six session event.
I seem to have found a few soapboxes to stand on in this column. I thank you for taking the time to read all the way to the endJ I will try to return to my more usual, shorter report next issue.
-- 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.