Blogs From Mastering Bridge

You will have noticed that we have a new set of blogs coming up on the site.  These are blogs from another website

www.masteringbridge.com

Mastering Bridge is a website primarily designed for bridge students and teachers.  Besides the Blog it has a bridge forum, articles for students, downloads and articles for teachers, a feature called teacher of the month which profiles some of our fine bridge teachers and so on.  If you are either a bridge teacher or bridge student have a look at the site and join in the forum.  Maggie Sparrow is the moderator and she will be pleased to hear your voice.

We decided that the Blog from this site might be of interest to some of the regular readers of www.bridgeblogging.com so we have decided to provide a feed for you to see.

Technical Glitches

Semi-Finals Already?!

It seems like only yesterday I posted the Quarter FInal results. Oh, wait. It was yesterday. 

Who are our final four?

Italy

Norway

England

Germany

I’m not going to tell you who is in the lead and who is in second place…you can probably already guess. But I will tell you that Iain Sime no longer has that competitive advantage. In fact, Mr. Sime and most of the others are no longer in the game. (Sorry)

Italy and Norway’s results will ultimately determine the winner, since everyone with the exception of Michael Yuen has chosen them to place in the top three.

Quarter Final results

What happened USA? I bet that’s what most of the contestants are asking, since many picked the USA as one of their top 3 final teams.

Malcolm Ewashkiw is in the lead still (no surprise there) with 24 points. He was the only person to pick England to make it past the quarter finals, giving him a slight advantage.

Apologies to Iain Sime. An excel formula error meant your score was miscalculated. Michael Yuen is actually in second place (23 points), followed by a tie between Paul Gipson and Aad Van Gent (21 points).  There is still hope for Mr. Sime, however. He is the only person at the moment whose final three picks are still in the running. 

Click here for the official quarter final results.

WMSG Contest: Round One

Update: Between the time I wrote this up this morning and this very second, Linda has informed me that France lost the tie-breaker and Romania takes the fourth slot for Group A. I have made my edits below…

The round robins for the Open are over and the results have been posted. How did our contestants fare?

First the results:

*Yes, there are two teams for the 4th slot in group A. No one picked both France and Romania, so it didn’t really skew the scoring.

The surprises? Estonia (group A) and Belgium (group C) were not on anyone’s radar. (Or at least, they were not on any of the contestant’s radars).

On the other end, we have the favorites that didn’t end up placing in the top 4 for their group: South Africa (group A), France (group A), Russia (group B), Sweden (group B), Iceland (group C), and Australia (group D).

The real question is, “But, who is in the lead for the contest?!”

Well, that my friends, is Malcolm Ewashkiw with 13 12 out of 16 possible points. Mr. Ewashkiw picked all of group B and group D correctly. Way to go Mr. Ewaschkiw!

Michael Yuen is in 2nd place choosing 3 correct teams/group (12 points). 

There are several three people tied for 3rd 2nd place, including Luc LaPointe who also picked all 4 teams for group D correctly;  Michael Yuen, who was actually ahead in points before my France snaffu; and Paul Gipson, our beercard blogger, who has now improved his standings since France was not one of his picks. 

As my mom would say, “Now we are cookin’ with gas!” I’m not really sure what it means, but I think it means that things are starting to heat up? Perhaps I am mixing metaphors though.

Stay tuned…

(ps. Monday is a holiday here in Canada, so we will post the quarter final results on Tuesday).

New Articles

Hi Friends

Today we began the “frequently updating” part of www.masteringbridge.com. There is a new article on the player page: “Bridge Slang“, written of course by Linda Lee. 

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s new article: “Running a Successful Novice/Intermediate Program at a Club“, by Barbara Seagram.

There will be two new articles each week, thanks to all of our generous writers. If you would like to submit an article, or if you have ideas for an article you would like to see written, please email me at becky@masterpointpress.com.

Pick Your Favorites for the Open…

As you may or may not have already guessed, we are excited about the World Mind Sports Games. Er, that might not even be adequate enough to describe the general mood around here. Perhaps: Super Excited! At the edge of our seats! We’re about to lose control and we think we like it! Oh yeah!

(too far?)

Anyways. We are pretty pumped, and we thought it would be fun to have a little contest with all of our fabulous friends (that’s you!). Linda already sort of announced that there would be a contest coming soon, so I figured now is as good a time as any to spell out the rules.

Here’s how it works:

Send me (becky@masterpointpress.com) your top  4 teams from each group for the Open division. To see the list again go here. Of your 16 teams, then tell me your favorite 8 that you think will make it to the quarter finals. And finally, pick your favorite 4 and rank them from 4th place to 1st place.

That’s your job. My job is to tally up the points and keep track of everything.

The points:

1pt/correct team for the qualifying round

2pts/correct team for the quarter finals

3pts/correct team for the semi finals

4pts for choosing the 3rd place correctly

5pts for choosing 2nd place

and 6pts for chosing 1st place

Why bother? Well, it’s fun. And MPP will give a copy of The Lone Wolff to the winner. Plus, it’s fun (did I say that already?)

I will accept entries up until October 2nd at 5pm (EST). My email again: becky@masterpointpress.com.

Go to it!

Side note to Paul Gipson: You’ve already started your guesses, so I hope to hear from you very soon about the rest of your guesses! 

Side note to Linda: You better consult the Oracle again so you can finish picking the winners from your top 16.

Side note to me: You better get an excel sheet ready.

So Many Great Things

We have been busy busy here at the office. As you’ve probably already noticed, Michael Yuen, Judy Kay-Wolff and Bob Mackinnon have joined the bridgeblogging ranks (Hello new bloggers!) and are blogging almost as frequently as Linda — almost. They’re a very ambitious bunch, with great ideas. And they keep me on my toes with new blogging problems to solve daily. 

We also moved the blog to a new home, which came with its own set of challenges. Most of the wrinkles have been ironed out thanks to help  — lots of help — from Colin and Sally. (Thank you, thank you, thank you!)

While all this was going on before your eyes, behind the scenes we were creating a new website: Mastering Bridge. The lovely Olena designed the site, Colin set up all the techy back-end stuff, and the rest of us wrote and wrote and wrote…and wrote some more. And then Voila! It happened. It all came together, just like that.

The site is meant for bridge teachers and people who are learning to play. There are lessons and exercises to download, articles to read, a forum for teacher’s to connect with each other and a blog written for the true beginner (you won’t see any complicated conventions described here!). 

I will probably focussing all my blogging on the Mastering Bridge Blog since I am, after all, a true beginner, but I’ll stop by here every once and a while to say hello and let you know about more great things here at the office.

‘Till we meet again!

Hello!

My first order of business is to get my tardy — very tardy — introductions out of the way. My name is Becky, and I have been an intern at Master Point Press since July. I spend a good deal of time on bridgeblogging.com, mostly helping our bloggers troubleshoot technical issues, or setting them up with new accounts. I’m not a bridge player (yet!) so I have never had any reason to post something to the site. Well, at least I didn’t, until today.

Thanks to my Google alerts, this morning Linda and I had cause for a celebration: Glen Ashton wrote the nicest compliment about Linda on his blog. You can read it here:

http://www.bridgematters.com/bridgematters/2008/08/potpourri-linda-lee-continues-to-be-one.html

And I’m not going to lie, Linda and I high-fived. You probably would too. Glen also sang the praises of many other bridge bloggers, many of which I didn’t know about, so I was super thrilled to add these bloggers to my Google reader list. One in particular really got me excited: Meg and McKenzie Myers’ blog http://www.doublesqueeze.com/.

Yesterday Meg posted an article she submitted to Bridge Bulletin about promoting the game to young players. It’s a topic that seems to come up quite often, and no one really seems to have a solution (or at least put a solution into action).

And even though I am not a bridge player, how to get more young folks playing bridge consumes my thoughts. I guess that is an effect from working in a bridge environment 24/7: I’ve caught the bridge bug, now if only I could get past the opening bid! It would seem that now more than ever, people should be turning to the game: gas prices are high and the economy has seen better days — those two things alone are incentive enough, I would think, for friends to want to turn to alternate (read: free) forms of entertainment.

Meg provided some very good solutions, but like most people, she says it’s up to ACBL and districts to take action. While I’m probably in no position to play devil’s advocate, I’m going to anyway. Why should we rely on them to take action? Why not take the matter into our own hands? I would be more than happy to help spread the word about bridge. And with the wonders of facebook you can mobilize all of your existing bridge friends to help. I think if we put our heads together we can come up with a plan that we can all act on.

Or maybe I’m just naive. In any case, I hope the discussion continues and that a workable solution is found.