Diana’s Time at the NABC in St. Louis

As you may have seen, the NABC is currently taking place in St. Louis. A few of us from BBO have been there as well, including Diana Serban (diana_eva on BBO), Dan Storch, Ivan Pavlovic, and Olivier Comte. While there, Diana also caught up with Barry Margolin, who works on the BBO systems team and is also a longtime bridge player, and they ended up playing together. Not just that, Diana also met a lot of BBOers like Leo LaSota, Morgan, any many more. Please read below a few moments from her, along with some photos from the week.

Story from Diana:

Thursday morning I tried the ACBL partnership desk. It’s a panel where people add their availability, how many points they have, and what they play. There's an actual desk, with a lovely person—her name is Joyce—helping people match up. I picked a card that said 2/1 and Joyce yelled "Jerryyyyy!!" So here comes this loveliest older guy and there we are, we're partners. We spent a good 15 minutes discussing in detail what we play, conventions, follow-ups, etc. I was a bit terrified inside that I’d mess up and forget all of this, but of course I was also aware that 99% of this stuff never comes up.

So we start playing, we do pretty well for a first-time partnership, and of course as we play we both forget everything we agreed to play. It was super funny because none of us had any idea what we were doing, but we still managed to finish with a decent score. We were actually 2nd in our flight (which does not say much as we were in the lowest one).

So this was a success, and I enjoyed doing the face-to-face version of “help me find a partner.”

Friday was more serious, because I played the open bracketed teams, meaning we got to play some pretty good teams. There were a good number of Europeans in the event, which usually means they are there to play the serious stuff. Nobody travels halfway around the world to St. Louis to play the regional side teams.

I played with Barry (barmar from the devs team), this was the first time we played together, and Barry is way more experienced than I am (he has something like 9000 points, while I have less than 700). The other people on the team were also in the range of several thousand masterpoints, so we landed in B (I dragged everyone down with my meek 3-digit count).

Here too, Barry prepared in advance, filled in a convention card with what we played online, printed it—he was a very good partner. He also kept all the scoring and reported the results and other logistics I had no idea how to do.

Funnily, when playing teams we had to actually shuffle the cards ourselves—there were no pre-duplicated deals. So step 1: take the cards and shuffle. Step 2: play.

There were no Bridgemates either. Players kept scores on a piece of paper and then compared at the end of each round to see if everyone recorded the same results. Then there was a fun part where both pairs from the team got together and compared the results. Something like:

They went over all the boards to see what each pair did, computed the difference, the IMPs, the Victory Points, then reported the results to the TD.

The other teams did the same, and in case there was a discrepancy between what two teams reported, they came back to compare and see who recorded which score wrong, or who got their math wrong.

Despite all of this being done manually, it went very fast. I could not even follow how quickly they were computing everything, filling it on a little card with the team’s result, and then rinse and start over.

So this was another interesting experience: how to play teams, shuffle and play, without Bridgemates.

We did rather badly, we had some very good opponents. Plus I did get confused about our system and forgot a bunch of stuff, which landed us in some unfortunate contracts, but overall it was fun and lighthearted. Barry and our teammates did not take the scores very seriously, and in general just enjoyed being there, playing, and discussing the hands.

There was a really interesting hand that I would have loved to share, but no Bridgemates, no hand records, so not sure how to find it and include it.

Other than the actual play, I met a lot of BBOers, which is always nice. And I finally met Leo LaSota, but this was towards the end of my stay there, so we just took a selfie and I guess we’ll get to chat more at the next one.

More pictures from the NABC St. Louis by Dan & Diana: