I've started receiving news of rank changes, so I'll do my best to celebrate them here. Congratulations to these players on new ACBL Masterpoint ranks!

Junior Master

Gail Klein

Club Master

Christine Atkinson

Sectional Master

Charles Jarai
Denise Wreede

Regional Master

Bonnie Cox
Lynn Sager

July was a great month, with five Mondays. One was a STaC game, and many folks won silver points. We even had our first swiss team game!

For July:

• Total Masterpoints reported: 45.54
• Number of players receiving Masterpoints: 66

The biggest winners with Denise Wreede and Karmen Armoudjian, with 2.12 for the month. Next up was Leila Otey with 1.73

Lately I've had some timely questions about a practice that seems to have become common especially among novice and intermediate players. I had an email from a director in Palm Desert who has noticed this practice, and a question about it at my most recent summer bridge class.

Players, as dummy, have been routinely reminding declarer which hand they're in. The common thing is tapping the table to remind declarer that she's "on the board."

When it was brought up in class, I said, "Well it has to stop!" which got a bit of a chuckle.

Let me go into detail about dummy's rights and privileges. They're quite explicitly called out in the Laws of Duplicate Bridge.

First, there's Law 42 B. "Qualified Rights" paragraph 2.:

2. He may try to prevent any irregularity.

Morris Jones
July 9, 2018

The 2017 edition of the Laws of Duplicate Bridge brought in many small changes, and one huge one: Law 23, the Comparable Call rule. The intent is to preserve a bridge result in place of the rather severe penalties of earlier laws. It's not a bad thing, but we'll be adapting to it for quite a while.

Imagine this situation: LHO (Left-hand opponent) is the dealer, but you're distracted with a good hand and you put down a 1♠ bid. The director is called, and your bid-out-of-turn is not accepted by the opponents.

The director cancels your bid, and the auction reverts to LHO who passes. Your partner has no restrictions, but is not allowed to act on the unauthorized information of your 1♠ bid. Partner opens 1♥. RHO passes.

I've been looking for just the right time to introduce a team game at BridgeMojo. I think July 2 is that perfect day.

It's the start of the Los Angeles Regional "Bridge Week" in Long Beach, with team events every day.

The Pasadena-San Gabriel Sectional will be playing Swiss Teams on July 29.

It's sort of a holiday week.

Team-of-four games at bridge use somewhat different scoring from the matchpoint pair games we usually play. It's actually much better in terms of "pure bridge." Matchpoint scoring tends to distort and magnify very small differences in score, and reduce the impact of large differences.

My desk with computer monitor and Dealer4 machine. On the screen is the Dealer4 software with a hand displayed.

Most players take my word when I say, "The hands are randomly generated and dealt to the boards by a machine." That's all true as far as it goes, but what does it really mean?

Let me give you a peek behind the curtain and show you what it takes to make pre-dealt hands and hand records for a duplicate pairs game1.

Since the early days of generating bridge deals by computer, quite a bit of research has gone into the mathematics involved. Early random number generators were woefully inadequate for being able to replicate a hand-shuffled deck of cards.

The big winner this month was Ron Lu with 1.81 masterpoints in May. Fred "Big Fred the Mischief Maker" Nelson was second with 1.53.

In all in May, 44 players earned masterpoints, and a total of 27.22 points were awarded. That includes a bit of silver for the May 7 STaC game.

June will be a short month with two Monday night games, but the extra benefit game for Alzheimer's Association on June 21, The Longest Day.

Lynn Sager and Adam Barron picked up almost two silver points for their 65% game in the May 7 BridgeMojo STaC game. Close behind were Rosemary Schroeder with Hilary Clark, and Dona Clark with Carolyn Buzin.

From the posted results, it appears that there were two clubs playing 749er games on Monday evening, BridgeMojo and the Bridge Gallery in Northern California. The table count was 16.5 total tables.

The full Monday evening STaC results can be found at this link.

The next Unit Game with lunch is Sunday, May 6, 1:00 p.m.
May 1, 2018

April featured not four but five Monday evenings to play bridge in San Marino. Here are a few happy statistics: