ACBL Individual Tournaments

[beowulf]

I mostly play ACBL Robot tournaments when I'm online and have no partner. Occasionally, I feel like some human interaction and I sign up for an ACBL Individual.

 

The standard of play is unbelievably bad in these tournaments. I don't mean subtle/advanced stuff such as watching partners discards or signals. Or counting out the whole hand. I don't expect that. But really basic stuff like when you have just one more loser in a suit contract and you can ruff it in dummy safely and then draw trumps. Is that so very hard? Or not ruffing partner's established winners on defense. We're not talking rocket science here.

 

So, it got me wondering. Is there any possibility that individual tournaments could be flighted? Could we have an individual tourney every now and then that is restricted to people who have reached Life Master status? I think that might be quite enjoyable.

[gordontd]

I mostly play ACBL Robot tournaments when I'm online and have no partner. Occasionally, I feel like some human interaction and I sign up for an ACBL Individual.

 

The standard of play is unbelievably bad in these tournaments. I don't mean subtle/advanced stuff such as watching partners discards or signals. Or counting out the whole hand. I don't expect that. But really basic stuff like when you have just one more loser in a suit contract and you can ruff it in dummy safely and then draw trumps. Is that so very hard? Or not ruffing partner's established winners on defense. We're not talking rocket science here.

 

So, it got me wondering. Is there any possibility that individual tournaments could be flighted? Could we have an individual tourney every now and then that is restricted to people who have reached Life Master status? I think that might be quite enjoyable.

How would their status be checked? Have you tried a BBF individual?

[ArtK78]

Not exactly responsive to OP's post, but many years ago individual tournaments were common in major tournaments. In fact, one of most prestigious tournaments was the annual Life Masters Individual held at one of the ACBL Nationals. A story related by Edgar Kaplan about his experience in the LM Individual reflected on the random nature of playing in an individual.

 

One round, Edgar was paired with a classic little old lady (I would say LOL but it doesn't mean the same thing as it used to). There was a competitve auction and the little old lady doubled the opponents' contract which was promptly made with no problem at all.

 

After the hand, the little old lady lamented that she didn't understand it, as she had 13 points. To which Edgar replied "Entirely my fault, my dear. I thought you had 300!"