[SBU Board] ACBL BoD Material

Fri Feb 28 14:48:35 PST 2020

I think Scott makes a good point about difficulty. In the most recent
regional in Vancouver WA, we played a team in the first round that easily
qualified for bracket 1 on masterpoints but weren't eager to be there and
they didn't really have a chance. One of their members had over 13000
points, but if looking at power rating his skill would be on par with a
normal B player. I have no clue what he was like 30 years ago, but he
didn't belong in bracket 1 today and his masterpoints alone meant his team
was going to be in bracket 1. The entire team was made up of B (skillwise)
players with two of them having north of 4000 MPs (enough for bracket 1),
and several of them expressed dismay at bracket 1 and how hopeless their
chances were, and they were promptly crushed by both teams in a round
robin.  Amusingly, our team was almost not allowed to play bracket 1
despite winning the same event (Fri/Sat KO) the previous year, again
because of masterpoint totals.

I think this is even worse for things like KOs. People drive across the
state to play, get obliterated, and then don't have anything exciting to
play in the evening. Ugh! Especially as they continue to be put in A level
events the rest of the weekend when they should be in B. One can easily see
how they would be less excited to come back if this experience kept getting
repeated.

I do think it's worth disagreeing a bit with JCs point about age and
travel. The linked article focuses on 50+, but from my experience with
financial planning and various other activities, 50+ and 75+ are very
different beasts. People travel plenty in their 50s, they have time and
money and still have their health and usually kids are gone. But 75+ and
especially 80+ the story changes. When helping people with financial
planning, spending for 80+ typically drops because most people stop doing
much traveling once they hit that age. I've also seen that when looking at
attendance/travel of various local players who I would have thought would
travel for tournamnets but are doing less of it these days. So while I
think Scott makes good points about motivation and JC makes good points
about we should look for other factors as well, I don't think we should
discount age in the discussion when talking about bridge attendance.

Also, when thinking about other things, schedule matters. I'm more familiar
with NABC scheduling issues because I've had significant experience with
people refusing to come to a certain NABC because of the schedule, but I
think it matters at the regional and sectional level as well. Lynnwood gets
(imo) pretty poor attendance from local players who are still working
because the schedule is so hostile. The sentiment I've heard over and over
is if they can't play without taking days off they would rather take days
off to go to a nice regional like Seaside than play Lynnwood (outside of
the weekend).

Eric

On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 11:35 AM Scott Chupack <scottchupack at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I agree with JC's conclusions. It seems easy to mix correlation with
> causation.
>
> But also, I think if we looked at the effect of age as it relates to
> regionals, sectionals and club games, I think you'd find that regionals are
> the most likely event to decrease by age. I would hypothesize that
> regionals are the most competitive of the 3 forms and as players age
> significantly beyond 70, their acuity levels tend to stabilize or decline,
> yet they are placed in tougher and tougher regional events because their
> raw number of masterpoints keep rising. I know that for me, the allure of
> large events historically has been to play against people at my level, yet
> bridge insists that the 80 y/o veteran must be placed at the same degree of
> difficulty of events as the 35 y/o wunderkind. No wonder, they get sick of
> coming and stick to their club game.
>
> I am a big fan of using advanced metrics in sports. Currently, the closest
> thing we have to advanced metrics in Bridge are things like the Power
> Ratings system. We could keep the masterpoints system as it stands for an
> awards metric, while using a system like Power Ratings for stratification,
> bracketing and flighting of events. There are other half-measures worth
> considering, like making exceptions for extreme cases, like Alzheimers or
> offering more Seniors events, but I think the competitiveness issue is the
> "Elephant in the Room" here.
>
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 10:43 AM JC Chupack <jc.chupack at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> First, Tim, thanks for sharing.  Always great to know what's going on
>> "above".
>>
>> The data and assumptions in this presentation raise some flags for me.
>> The presentation overindexes on aging membership as a root cause and yet
>> shows no data that supports that it is specifically a loss of members aged
>> 70+ contributing to the decline.  Slide 4 asks several good questions, but
>> the presentation focuses on the last bullet (age) only.
>>
>> Further, there's nationwide data that strongly contradicts the "older
>> people travel less" hypothesis, so if that is a trend, it may be limited to
>> the ACBL (which calls more into question the choices of locations or
>> overall interest in bridge rather than being a behavior of the segment).
>> Here's one example found with a quick Google:
>> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-aging-changes-the-way-we-travel-2017-03-10,
>> but the AARP and AAA have both published studies showing that travel as
>> well as activity generally is up among retirees, not declining. The age of
>> diminished activity is increasing as well. (Caveat: health care is a big
>> factor...and if the US health care system continues to decline in
>> availability and continues to increase in costs, that will be an impact on
>> seniors most of all.)
>>
>> Slide 6 is deceptive in a vacuum as well. We know from Slide 6's data
>> only that age is correlated with lower regional attendance. We don't know
>> that age is the cause vs. factors like distance to regional, availability
>> of alternative entertainment, etc.  It also doesn't show whether this has
>> changed over time or was always the case.  If this distribution has always
>> been true vs. being a recent change in behavior, then it is less likely to
>> be the reason for the decline.  (And again, if it *is* a change in
>> behavior, it's likely unique to the ACBL vs. being a common behavior of
>> individuals 70+.)
>>
>> I'd like to see this committee provide data specifically on segmentation
>> of the members that play once and don't return by gender, age, masterpoint
>> level, and years of ACBL membership.  Who are the players that arrive and
>> don't return?  Do those players continue to be active at the club level?
>> Has the committee reached out to a sampling of the "didn't return" segment
>> to ask why they came once and not again?  Even just having a phone call or
>> email with 20-30 randomly selected "tournament abandoners" would likely
>> yield valuable insight.
>>
>> I'll also note, IIRC, Seattle's unit has one of the lowest average ages
>> in the ACBL (SFBay/Mountain View beats us, maybe a couple others). Yet, we
>> are still seeing declines. If the same is true of other "low avg age"
>> areas, that further supports that age is not the (sole) limiting factor.
>>
>> Has the committee looked into the number of tournaments and count of days
>> of tournaments being offered in the decline period?  I believe there was
>> some data pulled by the ACBL that showed that the number of days of
>> tournaments offered in the past 5 years has increased sharply. That is,
>> it's entirely possible that people simply have more tournament days to go
>> to and thus a fixed size market is being spread more thinly across many
>> days of play.  While no region may like it, it may benefit the financials
>> of all tournaments if we simply offered fewer and/or shorter tournaments.
>>
>> tl;dr - If this is a starting point rather than an ending one, that's
>> great..but if it was intended as a conclusion, I think it's missing the
>> mark.
>>
>> --JC
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 1:03 PM Tim White <trkwhite at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Colleagues,
>>>
>>> I will be filling in for Julie Smith as D19 representative to ACBL Board
>>> of Directors and various committee meetings in Columbus.  I have begun to
>>> participate in preparatory teleconferences and have begun to receive
>>> various pre-coordination materials.  Where I come cross something I feel
>>> might be of interest or value to U446 board members, I will send it your
>>> way.
>>>
>>> One of the committees Julie works on (as vice chair) is the Strategic
>>> Tournament Task Force.  I am attaching a .ppt file I recently received
>>> reporting on developments with this committee.
>>>
>>>  I understand Julie plans to share this file with the D19 board.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Tim
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sbuboard mailing list
>>> Sbuboard at mailman.celestial.com
>>> http://mailman.celestial.com/mailman/listinfo/sbuboard
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> JC Chupack
>> * Seattle ACBL Unit 446 <http://www.bridgeinseattle.org> President,
>> Web/Email Admin, & Publicity Chair
>> * Lead Technical Product Manager, Zulily <http://www.zulily.com>, Inc.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sbuboard mailing list
>> Sbuboard at mailman.celestial.com
>> http://mailman.celestial.com/mailman/listinfo/sbuboard
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.celestial.com/mailman/private/sbuboard/attachments/20200228/70f6290b/attachment.html>