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Monday, 30 October 2017, 05:31PM -07:00 from Eric Sieg <<a href="mailto:easieg@gmail.com">easieg@gmail.com</a>>:<br><br><blockquote style='border-left:1px solid #FC2C38; margin:0px 0px 0px 10px; padding:0px 0px 0px 10px;' cite="15094098880000036693">
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<div id="style_15094098880000036693_BODY"><div dir="ltr">Hi All,<div><br></div><div>Just wanted to jot down thoughts/etc while they were still fresh.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>2) Attendance was obviously down, the aforementioned reasons plus Seahawks and an exciting baseball game on Saturday/Sunday probably didn't help either.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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:</div><div><br></div><div> 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.</div><div> 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.</div><div> 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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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).</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks all for coming/playing/helping/etc! :)</div><div><br></div><div>Eric</div></div>
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