The 2024 Ocean Shores Regional Start Page

Gateway to masterpoints, results, photos

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Basic Tournament Information

Location: The Ocean Shores Convention Center appears to be very nicely situated within walking distance of dozens of shops, restaurants, and places to stay. Online reviews are very positive about the space and the staff, and there is plenty of parking just outside the main entrance.

Driving: Ocean Shores is about 75 miles west of Olympia WA, which is where drivers from Olympia north will exit I-5 onto Highway 101 eastbound, choosing Highway 8 rather than exiting onto 101 going north, then driving through McCleary and Elma, where the road becomes Highway 12, continuing East through Montesano, Central Park, then through Aberdeen where the road again changes to Highway 101 eastbound. Crossing the bridge into Hoquiam, there are several routes to Ocean Shores, which is about ten miles to the west across Gray's Harbor at this point. Highway 109 from here brings you to the northern reaches of Ocean Shores. The route from Centralia south involves turning northeast of of I-5 at Grand Mound and taking Highway 12 through Rochester, Oakville, and Malone, to Elma, then contining on Highway 12 to the east and following the route described above. From Olympia or Centralia should take about 90 minutes of driving time.

The Convention Centre is very near what looks like the centre of town at Point Brown Avenue and Chance a la Mer, just north of the golf course, and there are dozens of restaurants and shops nearby, with many nearby places to stay just to the west near the coast. Support from the Westerly Motel, Days Inn, Comfort Inn & Suites, Ocean Shores Inn & Suites, and BayVue Hotel have helped greatly with support and we hope you will check them out first.

Transit: Gray's Harbor Transit has a route 60 that goes from Aberdeen and Hoquiam to Ocean Shores.

Alert: Entry sales are cashless: bring your credit or debit cards. Be sure to alert the seller if you want to split the entry among more than one card; this is easily done. $16US ($4 extra will be charged for unpaid or inactive members) is the entry fee per player per session. ACBL appears to be focussing on NABCs only for online entries, so it will be some time before they return to Regionals and Sectionals. For purchasing entries on site, directors will need to know for most events an approximate masterpoint total for your pair or team. This helps us ensure that no section or group of tables is significantly stronger than the others in a pair game, and helps us determine the brackets in a team game (so be as accurate as you can, please). "We're A's" is insufficient since we usually try to place the best of the A-strat in certain spots so the opposing pairs don't face you all in consecutive rounds!

Weather: November is statistically the wettest month of the year in Ocean Shores, almost twice as rainy as Vancouver or Seattle, so bring an umbrella! Temperatures are cool but not cold, with highs in the mid-50s Fahrenheit, about 11 degrees Celsius, and nights usually above freezing.

Dates, Times, Events: 9:00 am, 1:00 pm, and 7:00 pm are the start times from Tuesday thru Friday. The tournament begins on Monday November 4 at 7:00pm with a three-session Knockout Teams (which continues Tuesday morning and afternoon for surviving teams), and the first Evening Side Game session also takes place on Monday evening. On Saturday we have only 10am and 3pm (no evening session). On Sunday November 10, play begins at 10:00 am with a two-session Bracketed Round Robin Teams and a $10 surcharge per player for lunch. Sessions should end 3¼ - 3½ hours after they begin; on Sunday things should end by about 6pm in the teams, perhaps earlier. Morning Sessions from Tuesday to Friday have only one event: the Morning Side Game Series (five daily single session pairs games; you can play as many as you wish, even with different partners). The main sessions are afternoon and evening, with Open and Gold Rush 0-750 two-session Pairs, and Side Games (pairs) for those wanting to play only one session, and single day two-session Bracketed Knockout Team events begining on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Newer players should consider the bracketed team events, where the teams in a bracket will be fairly close to one another in average masterpoints, or the daily two-session 0-750 Gold Rush events (both players under 750), afternoon-evening Tuesday to Saturday (except for Friday, which will be the day when 0-750 players should plan to play up and see how they fare in the open field, where there will be an under-1500 strat). These events offer masterpoints for leaders in each of the two sessions and even greater awards for the leaders over the whole day's play, with gold points quite possible in the top strat, which everyone is eligible for, while pairs averaging 500 or less will also be eligible for red points in the lower strats.

The Table Counts page has a list of events by type with a column for each session of the tournament: even before I begin adding the table counts for each event it is a useful chart to plan which events to play. The official tournament flyer with the complete schedule is here.

Speakers at 6:15pm on Wednesday and Thursday (more may be announced later) are David Taylor (topic: An Intro to Endplays), who also will happily guide you to a bridge book or accessory or needed supplies, on Wednesday, and Jeopardy! champion James Holzhauer (topic: Declarer Play, Handling 4-4 Trump Fits), on Thursday.

COVID: ACBL and District policy recommends, but no longer requires, that all players be fully vaccinated. District policy is that masks are optional but players should expect to occasionally be asked to wear one if requested by the opponents (who must supply them). Just as some players are more uncomfortable with strong scents, some have serious concerns about the closeness of players at the table, and courtesy dictates that we do our best to accomodate both. Please co-operate if asked: masks will be available for those without one on hand.

Let's use common sense and remember that while we are all happy to see the end of the mandatory restrictions, COVID is still out there and everyone is still returning to normal at their own pace. Players should stay away from the crowded playing areas when symptoms suddenly develop that might be COVID. Most pharmacies have COVID testing kits available for free if you'd like to be sure before you play. At the same time, let's not ostracize anyone who sneezes or coughs a time or two and trust that they are being as vigilant as we all should.

Slience Those Ringtones Please! While we discuss courtesy (which I have always found in abundance with District 19 players in many pleasant visits), let's be sure to silence our gadgets. For today's cellphones this means more than simply setting the volume to zero: some phones play alarms and ringtones even if the sound is turned down. ACBL has relaxed the rules on penalties when a ringer goes off, but this shouldn't be happening. The onus is on each of us to discover how to prevent our gadgets from causing unnecessary distractions — not just cellphones: tablets you carry with you, watches that beep every hour, music players that sound a few tones every time they pair with headphones, gadgets you've left inside a coat somewhere, all can be major distractions to someone trying to interpret the hidden meaning of the auction or the cardplay or the conventions partner has forced on them. Take a moment and find out how to silence your gadgets, and get into the habit of doing it before each session, and undoing it afterwards. If you must be 'available,' vibrate mode is entertaining to all (as long as it is set to a level that avoids the sudden involuntary production of multiple penalty cards...)!

This Web Site: My plan for the Daily Bulletin site is to provide you with a quick daily digest of the events and results of the tournament, with direct links to ACBL Live for each event, if you want the complete details and deals. I write (or create software that writes) simple HTML that should render well on computers, tablets, or phone screens of most sizes. The site consists of a group of pages linked together by links bars like this one:

Daily Pages: Before the day's events are processed, these will contain a schedule of events:

• Team Events
• Two Session Afternoon and Evening Pair Games
• Side Games

There will be details on each event, what type of game it is, what the strat limits are, last year's winners, and a direct link to the ACBL Live results, which will be active following each session. Near the bottom of the page will be similar details on the following day's events.

At the end of the day Director-In-Charge Jenni Carmichael will send me the days results and I will process them into the website in the early hours of the morning. The "day completed" version will remove the "today's schedule" section and add in the day's results, in this order:

• Masterpoint Leaders at the end of the day (not including events that are not yet complete)
• Noteworthy News Items Received — tournament chair Karen Rise, co-chair Marilyn Olson and other members of the Ocean Shores organizing team will have messages and you'll see them interspersed throughout, with the heavy double white rounded border and a distinctive typeface to let you know this is official info!
• Two Session Pair Games: Open Pairs, Gold Rush Pairs
• Two Session Swiss or Bracketed Teams
• Completed Knockouts
• Rosters for Surviving Teams in Knockouts that are not yet complete
• Side Games
• Side Game Series Leaders
• Tomorrow's events will remain at the bottom of the page (and will also be available on the next day's page, of course.)

Round-By-Round Leaders!: Most events will include, just after the overall leaders, a colourful round-by-round account of the top pairs in each strat: where you were after each round, what you did, how far you were from the lead. There is much more on this new feature here.

Once a day's results are posted, I may revise it later if there are late scoring corrections: if so I will note this in the event headline. Some browsers save a copy of a page and do not check to see if the content has changed; in most browsers you should be able to hit F5 to reload the page and stop using the one your computer has saved. On tablets there is usually a circular arrow that does the same thing.

Other Pages: You're looking at the Welcome page right now. The Masterpoints! Page, which we call DUMPS (Daily Updated Master Point Summary) will be updated every night first, before the daily pages of results take shape, and will contain the latest masterpoint totals and tournament leaders, both overall and limited to non-Life Masters. Also, they will have everyone's current total broken down into red and gold points, but will not include masterpoints already won in events that have yet to be completed (such as knockout teams and multi-day Swiss events). The Photos Page will depend on people sending me photos taken. Now that everyone's cellphone has a camera, anyone can do this! Here is a good guideline on how to get best results:

• Above the Strike Zone: Try not to include in the frame any part of the body below where the letters would be on a baseball uniform. People want to see faces, not waistlines. If you have people of different heights, you might have to include the tall one's strike zone(s), but make faces your focus.
• Fill the Frame: Don't stand so far back that only 10%-20% of the frame is faces. Move up close and look at your screen as a guide. I will always crop out legs and shoes, and if this leaves an image that is small, the quality will suffer.
• Send the biggest version you can: It's important. ooga@shaw.ca is the address to send photo files to. Don't send the one that takes up the least bandwidth, it will look blurred on a screen if the resolution is lowered beyond a reasonable level.
• Identify!: I need to know who the people are and what they did. If they won an event, tell me which one and first names from left to right in the photo will suffice (I can get the rest from the data I am sent). I'd also like to credit the photo taker, so tell me who you are as well.
• Watch the lighting and background: At night, photos taken in the dark may not look too well and require touchup. The playing area is usually best for light. I have taken a lot of photos that seem to have trees coming out of the tops of people's heads, so avoid that if you can, although now that all photos will appear online in colour (as opposed to monochrome on paper), this is not as big an issue as it used to be. Leavenworth has some great outdoor scenes that would make great photos: if your team goes out for dinner, take a photo of the team somewhere and send it along if you win! Simple is usually best, against a wall inside the playing area, or even in a space in the middle with people milling around a distance away can sometimes work.
• Patience: There's a lot to do at scary hours during a Daily Bulletin week, especially when I have daily Director duties that require a reasonable amount of rest, and it may take a day or two before I can get around to posting photos. Or responding to those who have sent them.

The Table Counts page has been rewritten from a pdf of a spreadsheet to a Python program that puts the attendance data into a colourful HTML table. You can check it out to see a graphical-display of the events of each session, by type, and compare our attendance in 2024 to that of the District 19 Fall 2023 Regional in Lynnwood. A realistic goal is about 50% of the 2019 attendance, which happens to be a target of 690 tables!

Finally, the ACBL Live link goes to the list of tournament events, from which you will need another click or three to find the one you want. Direct links are available from the event results on the daily pages and should be faster.

Thanks for visiting! This is still a work in progress and the progress in getting it where I want it to be continues slowly, but that's web development for you! For this Welcome page, I used a deep sea blue for the Welcome page this time, after looking at the photos of Ocean Shore this seemed to be appropriate; hopefully the weather will behave and we will get some nice sky blue hues as well. We have a lot more color in the pages post-pandemic, with each page having its own palette. Two years off during the pandemic and a look at what I did in 2019 produced the impression that we needed a splash of non-white for the pages, and a bit of CSS work made this happen quickly. (I've already heard the line that it now looks like a Canadian billfold and I approve!) Feel free to contact me (see above) with reports of errors or if something isn't working for you.