Also don't sleep on Multon, hes a sleezeball/shady as hell but hes a damn good player. No idea about Martens but I assume he's good. I think the playing requirement is really low in the europeans so I assume Zimmerman has just played the minimum (25 or 30 %?) vs the hopeless teams where they rate to beat them pretty bad anyways, and then a front 4 that includes Helgemo/Helness and Multon which is probably top 2 or 3 in the event can handle the rest.

And also helgemo-helness are even more nasty in a field where people are scared to cheat/cheaters have been kicked out.

I honestly feel that the best players are even bigger outliers now with the biggest cheaters gone, they are much better than the next best players. Helgemo and Helness don't even play any system lol, it's sick. I saw helgemo respond 2S over 2C yesterday on Jxxxx Qxxx xxx K, they are just YOLO

That's unbelievably ballin to be crushing a field that good with iffyish teammates.

Glgl

A funnish hand at the club last night.

You arrive in 6H by South on:

North:

KT9x
AJ9876
K
xx

South:

Ax
K54
AQx
Kxxxx

(you don't really want to know)

Blessed with a low diamond lead, you...

ruff a club in dummy at trick 5 looks better

Could be; why though?

meh - I was thinking that taking an extra club ruff protects against 4/0 trumps but in fact your line already does that...

Mitch Towner (US bridge player who played juniors not that long ago) took down monster stack for 1.1 mil. Sick.

Ya, good to see for sure. Have had a bunch of friends win bracelets but they are low 6 figure scores in limit events or the like. These 7 figure scores from 7k-runner NLHE events are insane. Gotta be good but also run so hot...

http://www.wsop.com/news/2016/Jun/78...2016-WSOP.html

sick life

That's awesome, congrats to him. Met him in Toronto when he was playing with jjbrr, was a lovely guy.

-
A7643
A10
976532

A9764
KJ98
543
A

you declare 6H with the bottom hand - opening lead is the 2 of hearts led from

K1053
1052
9862
KJ

leaving

QJ82
Q
KQJ7
Q1084

for your RHO

I didn't play the hand - it cropped up on a hand record from the final of the Oz butler pairs final a couple of days ago whilst I was checking how a variety of mates were travelling (1 of 10 bid 6H and they made it on the 2 of hearts lead - plenty in 4H's but they all made 10 or 11) - deep finesse tells me you make 12 tricks in hearts either way up - I am decent double dummy but 20 minutes looking at it and maybe another 20 reflecting on it in the shower last couple of days and I am still screwed - I am going to break out a deck of cards soon which will be a first - unless one of you guys can spot it for me...

I am sure there is a better way to format the hand - probably some software I could use to answer my question too...

cheers - spent a couple of minutes looking at that ending wondering what you might call it before remembering a great hand Tim Seres played a long time ago - he was in 3NT and after a couple of endplays some rare squeeze appeared and he made 9 - one of his opponents muttered "well played" and asked him what the position was called - he promptly responded "9 tricks"

My long nightmare of a journey to Silver LM is finally complete, thanks to a rousing second place finish (with a 54%, whoop de doo) in a three-table NAP qualifying game.

Congrats!

Yay!

(Yay? I can never decide whether getting more points is good, though I suppose these days it's almost necessary if you don't want to play in bracket 17.)

The solution to not playing in bracket 17 is to not go to events with that many teams. Bracket 2 (of 2) for life!

Here in the Bay Area, it turns out that "Swiss" — the standard fare on Sunday of every tournament — actually isn't Swissl instead, anything that in the rest of the ACBL would be a Swiss gets flighted into brackets of eight, with a full round robin within the eight. No Swiss; if you're not among the eight top teams in terms of MPs, you've no opportunity to play against them. (Playing up is not done.) Masterpoint awards are ridiculously high so there's plenty of opportunity for that if that's your goal, but if your intention is simply to play your best bridge against the best opponents, then you're out of luck except to the extent the best opponents happen to be in your bracket.

Not quite as bad, but here even sectional pair games tend to be broken into A/X and B/C/D, or open and 499er.

I think D23 is unusual in its abandonment of the Swiss format but in general, flighting is what's now done wherever possible. And in this world, having points is mostly good... which is good because in this world, everyone's accumulating points at an ungodly rate.

My most frequent partner these days has more than 4000 points so that helps get me into decent brackets, but it sucks that I have to think about it.

bracketed swiss is very common. most people seem to like it, and the people who play better than their MP totals obviously dont.

Our regional has bracketed KOs (but it's a very small regional; occasionally it ends up one bracket and then becomes a handicap KO). The Swiss events are A/X and BCD. When there is an open pair game as the main it's combined with a gold rush now I think. Plenty of chances to play against the better pairs if you want to. I suspect that's most people's description of what a sectional looks like but such is life outside the big city.

in Florida (and possibly some other places?) when they run the bracketed round robin thing they make the top flight open (and thus a Swiss) for people who want to play up, and the lower brackets as 8 team round robins. kind of the best of both worlds.

when they started that though they didn't do it that way and it was kind of funny. I was on a team of 4 grand life masters and we sat down against zeke jabour (who has like 30k + points). we were in bracket 2! but then we got moved up to bracket one because a Larry Cohen and joel Wooldridge team forgot to put that their master point total was for a 5 handed team (I assume they thought it wouldn't matter). Larry Cohen didn't seem very impressed to be moved down to bracket 2 lol.

it must be nice to have enough teams where you can do that stuff.

It is weird to me that you get excluded from a field based on master-points. I understand that for the biggest events that is necessary but generally speaking I pity the promising juniors and any player who really wants to get better. There are a few restricted (by master-points) events here (locally or nationally) but they don't get big fields.

I hear the argument that playing opponents who are way above your level is going to discourage some players. That just isn't much of a thing here. The juniors and the keen beginners/intermediates love to play against the best players and the play bridge for fun crowd love bragging to their mates about how they swissed it to table 1 or 2 and got to play "Garozzo". If you have master-points as a sole motivation there is always the Wednesday night duplicate at the local club.

Seems like money for master-points has just run rampant in ACBL land.