"Princton", or, the state of inter-collegiate bridge

Our motley crew is now in Atlanta safe and happy, but since we didn't play bridge today I want to write about something that's been on my mind for a long time: the college bridge tournament. There's an upcoming meeting on this in Nashville and we ended up chatting about it a couple days ago. Here's what I have to say.

For mediocre junior players like Alex, Argenta and I, inter-collegiate bridge is a big deal. We like playing on teams with our classmates; we like that it forces us to get better for the sake of defending our college rivalry, and it's one of the few kinds of victories that non-bridge playing friends of ours respect. There are really only two events right now on the college bridge calendar: the joker OKB/Fifth Chair tournament (which is not worth discussing here) and the big-deal official ACBL tournament with a high-stakes qualifier on BridgeBase. The latter is a serious tournament for which Yale always fields a number of teams and, in my opinion, is one of the best ways to get people more interested about competing at bridge. Unlike most entry level junior bridge, there's a lot on the line: bragging rights, a free plane ticket, room and board, and, if you win at the NABC's, a $500 scholarship.

I'm pretty sure the ACBL thinks it really cares about trying to bring new juniors into the game, but this extremely important online qualifier has for the past two years been poorly planned and poorly executed. The format speaks for itself - 4 unseeded brackets, with 5 5-board matches(!), and Swiss match-ups (instead of a round robin), even though there are only about 8 teams per bracket. Only the top team in each bracket qualifies, meaning the bracketing makes a huge difference. However, the bracketing process is not revealed to schools and from my understanding is hand-picked by ACBL honcho, based on nothing but reputation.

No bridge player I've talked to seriously believes this type of event is a good judge of skill, and it sheds bridge in the worst possible light to new players. While the ACBL doles out thousands of dollars to design a flashy and largely irrelevant (save Mike's enjoyable blog) pre-teen website and finance random junior classes, it refuses to spend or raise money (or even ask juniors for money) to fix the event or let more teams fly down to nationals: an exciting incentive that brings more juniors to the table and makes teaching bridge an easier sell to friends.

In short, here are the problems:
1) The event is way too short. 25 boards is a not a good way to judge skill, and 5 board matches are very random, and yet the rewards are large.
2) The bracketing is at best arbitrary, and at worst conspiratorial. There's no way to seed teams fairly, and this delegitimizes the event when only team per bracket can qualify.
3) The event is run slowly and awkwardly because of the lack of good BBO chatting options and because the people running aren't good computer people.
4) The qualification rules are bent or broken for teams that ask for it.
5) The event needs more money so that 8 teams can qualify again for Nationals as they did in the past. No $5000 (or whatever it is) would be better spent on junior bridge.

Here are my proposed solutions:
1) Eliminate bracketing, and make it one big Swiss with 4 or 5 7-board matches. This makes the event more fair, faster to run (no waiting for one slow team), and can quickly show which teams are in the running.
2) If ACBL wants to send 8 teams to the NABCs, it can have the first 4 teams qualify automatically and have the next 8 play-off in a Knockout or Swiss, seeded by VP score, for the last 4 spots. If the ACBL wants 4 teams to qualify, they can qualify the first two automatically and have the next four fight it out in a play-off for the remaining two spots. This playoff method is not ruined by changing the number of qualifying teams (removes the winner takes all) and means that beginner teams with less serious players who don't want to play 48 boards don't have to.
3) Get the money, somehow, for 8 teams to go every year. Ask Bill Gates. Ask Warren Buffet. Ask the membership, but gosh darn it, where is all that Junior money going? Into my pocket for teaching lessons, yes, but events where something is actually on the line is THE BEST WAY to get the non-bridge playing junior public interested in the game - exactly what the ACBL is trying so hard to do in more expensive, less efficient ways. Give it more billing in the magazine. Run better press releases in non-bridge media. Make this event a big deal and it will make help foster more college clubs, which will in turn create more high school interest...
4) Let volunteer juniors run the event, and/or pay them to design good online score reporting/directing, and/or pay BBO so that these tournaments are easier to run.
5) Let us juniors dictate and enforce the conditions of contest so that we can determine what the most fun qualification rules would be, and can vote to see if this format makes sense, etc. It matters so much more to us than to you.

At least #5 might be soon implemented. The ACBL, in response to widespread complaints, is letting Eric (the one on our trip) call a meeting to discuss these problems. If you're going to be at the Nashville NABCs, and care about this at all, you should come and speak your mind. First Sunday at 11am.

Why does this event matter so much? Old people put all this stock in teaching bridge to middle schoolers and elementary school kids. "Get 'em hooked early," or whatever. Ok, fine, but are middle schoolers going to think Bridge is cool when their bridge class gives homework and no kids they know older than them are playing? There's no junior bridge in a vacuum (Eric: "Unless it's a reaaally big vacuum). Kids look to older kids as to what is worth doing in school and in life. If it isn't cool to start learning in college, it will never be cool to start learning in middle school or high school. And college bridge is a hell of a lot cooler if there is a good, competitive outlet for skill in it with an obtainable prize.

Bridge IS cool. We can prove it, one college club at a time, if the ACBL doesn't let us down.

(In the interest of full disclosure, we came in second in our bracket by one VP this past year and were pretty disappointed that the ACBL changed the number of qualifying teams per bracket from 1 to 2. But this isn't just sour grapes either: we sent a lengthy email to the ACBL about it three months before the qualifier and never got a response; Alex and I are going to the NABC anyway; and I won't even be playing in the event next year. The event needs to change for junior bridge's sake, not for ours.)

(For those confused about the title of this post, the previously mentioned meeting was called into existence by a semi-hilarious email forwarded on June 27th, titled by Mable Wilkes as: "Message from Eric Mayefsky, captain of the Princton bridge team." (forget the spelling - Eric has gone to Stanford for 5 years and only played for Princeton once). It's sort of a metaphor for the handling of juniors in general, I think...)