GCC and Bracketed KOs

[jeffford76]

So you can only play midchart (not counting defenses to 1nt) in the top bracket of the five full KO and then on the final Sunday A/X Swiss. And this is for a regional which in ACBL is the biggest most prestigious type of tournament after the nationals.

 

Yes. This is much different than "allowed if no team averages below 1500". Our team with about 20K total MPs was in bracket 2 in Seaside last year, and the bottom team was at least 10K. I realize this isn't an enormous number, but it should have been enough to play midchart.

[JLOGIC]

Yes. This is much different than "allowed if no team averages below 1500". Our team with about 20K total MPs was in bracket 2 in Seaside last year, and the bottom team was at least 10K. I realize this isn't an enormous number, but it should have been enough to play midchart.

 

That seems pretty dumb that they would make a policy where a bracket like that would not be allowed to play midchart.

 

I view GCC only events as attempting to "protect" people from playing against strange conventions that they either don't want to play against, or could not defend against due to inexperience/lack of skill.

 

I think once you reach a certain point, you should not get that protection and should have to play against relatively simple things that are on midchart (the only midchart things I ever play (I think) are kaplan inversion and multi over the opps NT...these are not that hard to play against)).

 

You can debate where to draw the line, but certainly a bracket that ranges from 10k-20k must cross that threshold.

[CSGibson]

Yes. This is much different than "allowed if no team averages below 1500". Our team with about 20K total MPs was in bracket 2 in Seaside last year, and the bottom team was at least 10K. I realize this isn't an enormous number, but it should have been enough to play midchart.

 

Quick question: Did you ask the directors whether mid-chart was allowed in your event/Bracket?

 

One possible interpretation of this is that all of the specified events will allow mid-chart no matter what the bottom team average MP is, and that other brackets will conform to the ACBL guidelines; based on prior experience, I feel like this is actually what is meant, but I have nothing concrete.

[jeffford76]

Quick question: Did you ask the directors whether mid-chart was allowed in your event/Bracket?

 

No, although we also didn't know we were in bracket 2 until reporting our match. We would have asked to move up if we'd thought there was any chance we wouldn't be in bracket 1, but they had a weird number and only put 9 in bracket 1.

[Mbodell]

*our mid-chart methods are the incorporation of bad 3 card limit raises into 2C over 1M, and using 2H to show either a balanced 11-12, a balanced 16-17, or a game forcing hand with clubs over either of our minor suit openings. For the first, we simply take out the bad 3 card limit raises, loading everything into either the traditional limit raise or a direct raise to 2M. For the 2nd, we play that 2H guarantees 3 clubs, giving it an anchor suit and (I think) making it GCC legal.

 

I'm about 95% sure that your fix to 2♥ doesn't make it GCC unless "balanced 11-12" is a game force for you. Having an anchor suit doesn't impact GCC for responses (although if you 2 anchor suits that include a known 5 card suit and a second known 4 card suit then you'd be ok - since reverse Flanery and the like is ok - but 54 in the minors is not ok since it could be 5=4 or 4=5). You might be ok if it is either a force to game or a raise of the opened minor with the clause "5. SINGLE OR HIGHER JUMP SHIFTS AND/OR NOTRUMP BIDS AT THE TWO LEVEL OR HIGHER to indicate a raise or to force to game." It is a little unclear how to read the or in the sentence but I think it means a 2-way bid that is either a raise or any force to game is ok since responses 3 already allowed all conventional responses which guaranteed game forcing values as long as they aren't a relay system.

 

One possible interpretation of this is that all of the specified events will allow mid-chart no matter what the bottom team average MP is, and that other brackets will conform to the ACBL guidelines; based on prior experience, I feel like this is actually what is meant, but I have nothing concrete.

 

That hasn't been my experience when that wording is used elsewhere. In theory of course, because you don't need to advertise for midchart in KO >1500 average it could well be that this only specifies some places midchart is allowed, and doesn't explicitly say that GCC is elsewhere. But in practice, this is proscribing the only place midchart is around and everywhere else is GCC+1nt defenses.

[Siegmund]

At least in District 19, "top bracket of KOs" meant only one bracket no matter how many MPs you had, and it was very rare to see anybody play up. I was on the D19 board in the late 90s, and floated a proposal to have one full-fledged beginning-to-end Mid-chart event, and had a list of several people who said they would come up from California etc for the whole week if we had one such event... and the motion got defeated something like 2-9.

 

Believe me, they acted like they were making a HUGE concession to allow it in the top bracket only -- and they were doing that in the knowledge that there were very unlikely to be any Midchart conventions used often even there. They wanted to welcome pros practicing for international events, but warn young punks who wanted to experiment with their systems that they were not welcome. It was not an accident that they said top-bracket-only and made absolutely no effort to allow or encourage playing up.

 

Come to think of it, even that one concession might not have been made, had a team of 4 rather prominent Australians not come to one of our tournaments in Victoria, BC, and received quite a hostile welcome when they tried to play one of their simpler systems.

[thomas c]

we dont play acbl events anymore. part is because internet play is so available. my wife is from austria and when we visit we play quite a bit everything is allowed and alerted in a foreign language(to me) i think it is fun and i love to play there. in acbl land they wont let us play up ( even in a national we attended years ago) because we dont have many masterpoints as all of you know mps really have little to do with how well you play sinc it is mostly an attendance record. we are too old to have 2 systems. shoot, we forget stuff even now. so we choose to not play acbl anymore. i think there are a lot of people like us