[SBU Board] Halloween Sectional Post Mortem

[Eric Sieg]

Hi All,

Just wanted to jot down thoughts/etc while they were still fresh.

1) Energy in general seemed down. Lots of people seemed pretty bridged out
after Seaside and Olympia right before the sectional and Whistler starting
the next day. Also a chunk fighting off illness, I had a pretty brutal cold
the whole time which Leah caught as well. I heard a few other people
missing due to illness and it sounded like Renee was coming down with it by
the end as well.

2) Attendance was obviously down, the aforementioned reasons plus Seahawks
and an exciting baseball game on Saturday/Sunday probably didn't help
either.

3) the 199er game Friday night didn't make. As a result we gave those who
came to play in it but weren't able to a 50% off entry they could use in
the 199er game the next day. 4 of the pairs stayed and joined the open, 1
pair went home. I tried to personally catch and talk to everyone and
apologize and hope they came back. I think I caught everyone, but might
have missed one pair. Everyone seemed pretty upbeat about it, but I got a
few comments from those before that we shouldn't try to run a Friday
evening 199er. I'm not sure if offering 0-750 in the evening instead would
have been a good idea or not.

4) Flyer confusion that we should rectify next year: the Open Pairs
(Qualifying Session) can't be stratified, however the bottom right corner
suggested that it could be. Instead, the BR corner should probably have
said "Stratified Pairs" to match the events listed on Friday.

5) With the Swiss on Sunday having a low # of teams, and also an odd number
of teams, I asked Jenni to flip it from 7 rounds of 8 to 6 rounds of 9.
This avoided weird 7th round issues where people can end up playing a
significantly weaker or stronger team, meant we finished earlier, prevent
some round robin weirdness in the 7th round, and also kept the total boards
in the same ballpark. The 2500 swiss ran 6 rounds of 8 which seemed to run
about the same speed as 9 board rounds in the A/X.

6) One piece of feedback I heard was that several people felt our Swiss
tended to finish late and there were several "oh, this is pleasantly early"
comments afterward due to the 6 rounds of 9 going faster than 7 rounds.
When discussing boards with Jenni before the event, she was suggesting that
7 rounds of 8 would finish around 7:30 PM which seemed unnecessarily late.
As a contrast: when I played in the A/X Swiss in Victoria in April, I was
done by 5:05 PM and had no issues getting to the clipper by 5:45PM despite
the fact there were a LOT more teams to worry about. All scores were in and
winners announced by about 5:20 PM. Going from 7 rounds of 8 to 7 rounds of
7 doesn't seem like it could possibly be the entire difference. Thinking
back, I noticed a few differences:

    A: They started at 10 instead of 10:30. This made me curious so I
looked at other sectional start times. Roughly 80% of sectionals are
starting at 10 AM or earlier on Sunday. Is there any particular reason to
start at 10:30? EBC starts their Tuesday and Thursday day games at 10 AM
and that's when traffic is worse AND they only have 1 session of bridge
coming instead of 2.
    B: Victoria directors were careful to move things along quickly. If I
remember correctly, any team who turned in a result late got a mark and
anyone who had a 2nd late result (regardless of fault) received a penalty.
This was great as it kept things moving.
    C: I don't remember how long we got for lunch, but an hour seems like a
really long time. Maybe we can cut this down to 45 minutes? There's food 5
minutes away walking and a TON of food 10 minutes away driving. The break
on Sunday seemed insanely long, we drove a long ways away, had a long
leisurely meal, went over results, got back with 20 minutes to spare, then
walked to Starbucks to kill time and enjoy the weather while waiting for
the event to start again.

My thought after this tournament would be that going forward we stick to
the unit policy of 7 8's in the A/X but explore methods to move things
along faster more like Victoria did. Perhaps run 7 7's in the BCD Swiss to
go at about the same speed. This matches the suggestion I found in the ACBL
handbook for Swiss: "Top flights often play more boards per round than
concurrent lower flights (seven rounds of eight and seven rounds of
seven)". It also suggests 45 minutes for 7 board rounds and thus extending
that math out it would be 51 minutes for 8 board rounds. Even 55 with a 5
minute turn around for pairing along with a 10 AM start time would be
reasonable and get people out at 5:45 (45 minute lunch) or 6PM (1 hour
lunch). Anyway, something to think about for the future but it felt like
finding ways to get people out quicker would be a good goal for future
tournaments.

7) In addition to several board members staying late to help clean up, Beau
Hovda stayed until the end and was instrumental in cleaning up - especially
with some cleanup crew not feeling well and being unable to stay. Would
love to see him get a voucher for a free play at a future sectional. If
anyone can bring one of those to the board meeting next week, I'll get it
to him along with thanks from the board. Per Ann's request, Susan Cothern
also had free plays throughout for all her help.

8) Cleanup was delayed a bit by trying to figure out Jason's number,
calling Patti to have him come over, etc. He was really helpful and helped
load the trailer which was great. John pointed helped out a ton with
cleanup and also pointed out the dropbox for me which was fabulous. Bill
Campbell was the last one out, letting me get Leah home as final janitorial
stuff was going on which was great.

9) Somehow the janitor closet got locked close which caused lots of issues.
This mainly fell on Ann (hospitality) and Bill (who made a special run to
buy stuff Sunday morning) but definitely caused issues. Not sure how it
happened, but we need to work harder to make sure it doesn't happen again
in the future.

10) Jeff mentioned to me that in the past they would provide trophy updates
throughout the sectional and post updated standings each day. He requested
that we consider doing that again in the future which seemed like a fun
idea, especially if there is no runaway winner like there was in 2016 (Pat
Dunn had it locked up before the final day).

11) I was asked about the cell phone policy and was told that in previous
tournaments we were fairly lax. I didn't see any reason or feel like I had
appropriate authority/reason to change that, but did receive a complaint
about cell phones going off causing a distraction. I'm not recommending a
change, just something to discuss and confirm I had the correct
understanding of our approach etc. Lots of people (including Tim) were
busily checking scores of sporting events on Saturday/Sunday so I would
assume any change to a more serious policy would make a group of people
unhappy.

That's the stuff I remember for now. Please feel free to add
comments/feedback etc that you heard. If you have or heard criticism on
what I did specifically, please feel free to add that to this thread or
shoot me an email privately. I had a pretty brutal cold this tournament so
tried to stay away from hospitality/food stuff, but tried to do my best the
rest of the time although Bill Campbell put more actual hours into helping
than I did.

Thanks all for coming/playing/helping/etc! :)

Eric
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