The 2026 Leavenworth Regional Start Page

Gateway to masterpoints, results, photos

Alert: your browser may be showing you an old version of a page which is updated often. F5 (computer) or the ↻ button (phone or tablet) will get you the most recent version.

Basic Tournament Information

Location: Leavenworth is a unique city in central Washington state, about fifteen miles northwest of Wenatchee on Highway 2. The city has a Bavarian theme throughout, a deliberate strategy to re-invent itself which took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. The early history of Leavenworth was based around the second largest sawmill in Washington State, built before World War I. The tournament site is the Festhalle, at 1001 Front Street. Near the Festhalle are dozens of restaurants of all types, many with a south German theme. The climate in spring can be cool with some precipitation days, so bring warm clothing and rain gear just in case, although many days will be bright and sunny (but cool as you return after the evening session).

Driving: From I-90 going westward, exit Northbound onto Hwy. 97 in Ellensburg at the W. University Way exit, then left on Hwy 2, northwest through Peshastin into Leavenworth. From I-90 going eastward, exit in Cle Elum at the 970 junction for a shortcut to Highway 97 and then left where it meets Highway 2. Highway 2 east from Everett, north of Seattle, is a much more scenic route which will take about two hours. Highway 2 west from Wenatchee is about 20-30 minutes drive.

Parking: (Awaiting information on parking in 2026)

Transit: Link Transit now has three routes serving Leavenworth, the 32 is the Leavenworth Local, going from one end of the city to the other along Highway 2, the 22 is the original route from Leavenworth to Wenatchee, and the 122 is an express that runs six times a day on weekdays.

Link Transit also now has a DART service that you can contact in advance to schedule a ride to anywhere in the area; check the link above for details.

Bus/Train: Northwestern Stagelines connects Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett Station with Leavenworth on the very scenic Highway 2 route, and continues west as far as Spokane, leaving Everett daily at 10:10am and leaving Leavenworth for the coast at 2:55pm daily. There is also an Amtrak train from Seattle and Everett which leaves late afternoon daily and arrives just after 8pm; the return trip leaves at about 7:15am and arrives on the coast later that morning. The train trip is perhaps a bit more comfortable than the bus, but is a bit longer and much of the trip is through mountain tunnels, limiting the scenery. Important: If you come by Amtrak you need to arrange to be picked up or taken to Icicle Station, which is a considerable distance from the city centre, way too far to drag your bags and you may encounter bad weather or get eaten by a bear if you try...so don't! Call Leavenworth Shuttle and Taxi at 509/548-7433 to arrange a pickup from the station, or a shuttle to the station. The bus route's Leavenworth stop is at Icicle Road, which is about a mile southwest of the tournament site: close to some of the hotels but farther from others: you might need to get a cab or a Link Transit DART from there.

Restaurants and Shops: The Festhalle is very near many local restaurants and shops of all types. The beauty of the town will entice you to walk the nearby blocks between sessions, and you will make many interesting discoveries, both on Front Street and along the many cul-de-sacs that lead from it. Basic groceries are available at Dan’s Food Market, about ten minutes walk east of the Festhalle just past McDonald’s, and at Safeway, a short drive further east.

Tournament Site: The Festhalle has plenty of nearby parking and will feature all the usual tournament amenities: Hospitality, Partnerships, flyer desks, just inside the main entrance. We’ll let you know about special and speakers, as we find out the information.

Dates, Times, Events: 9:00 am, 1:00 pm, and 7:00 pm are the start times from Tuesday thru Friday; and then everything changes for the weekend. The tournament begins on Monday April 13 at 7pm with a three-session Knockout Teams (which continues Tuesday afternoon and evening for surviving teams), and the Dudley Brown Memorial Pairs which is also the first Evening Side Game session. ALERT! Starting on Saturday we switch to 10:30am and 3:30pm (no evening session). On Sunday October 29, play begins at 9:30am with one event: a bracketed Swiss Teams. The weekend start times are 30 minutes different than the start times for the Grand National Teams events which will also take place at the Festhalle, for teams in the A flight (0 - 6000 as of August 2025) and the C flight (0 - 750 non-Life Master as of August 2025). Sessions should end 3¼ - 3½ hours after they begin, on Sunday things end by about 5:30pm and perhaps earlier. Morning Sessions from Tuesday to Friday have only one event: the Morning Side Game Series (open pairs). The main sessions are afternoon and evening, with Open and Gold Rush 0-750 two-session Pairs, Side Games for those wanting to play only one session, Bracketed Round-Robin Team events on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Saturday, when some players will be playing in the GNT, the strats are changed slightly in the Saturday Open, and the Saturday Gold Rush pairs is a Super Gold Rush pairs, allowing players up to 1250.

Newer players may be best placed in the single-session Side Games, or the next step up for developing pairs players would be the daily two-session 0-750 Gold Rush events (both players under 750), afternoon-evening on Tuesday to Friday and morning-afternoon on Saturday. The Gold Rush 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.

New to Regional Tournaments? Welcome! Newer players can play in the Side Games or in the daily two-session 0-750 Gold Rush events (both players must be under 750, or 1250 on Saturday only), 1pm and 7pm Monday to Saturday. 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.

Before the June 2025 Penticton tournament, which began on Tuesday Afternoon, I used the Monday Bulletin space to write two articles for newer tournament players. The first, Streamlining Your Tournament Experience, tries to answer many of the questions Directors get often at Regional tournaments, especially now that many online players are trying big tournament live bridge for the first time. It’s good reading for all players, general tournament survival tips to avoid confusion and stress and concentrate on your bridge game. The second article, Jazz and Bridge, was directed even more at newer players, with ten big-picture tips often missed in the struggle to master the finer points. There is even a link to a third article, Hurry Up And Think, that I wrote almost thirty years ago but has been reprinted at tournaments around the world after being posted on a English TDs website. While directing at the 2024 Toronto NABC, someone saw my nametag and recognized me from the Internet posting of this article three decades ago!

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 very occasionally be asked to wear one if requested by the opponents (who must supply them). Just as some players are quite 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.

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 people gathering from different locations is a prime source for potential spread. 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.

Please do NOT wear any fragance! Just as we courteously try to accomodate those who prefer masks in close conditions, we should be equally courteous to players for whom even the slightest of scents can cause considerable discomfort at the table.

Slience Those Ringtones Please! While we discuss courtesy (which I have always found in abundance with District 19 players), 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 or a purse somewhere, all can be major distractions to someone nearby 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 production of 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 in this order:

• Morning-only Games
• Two Session Afternoon and Evening Games, Teams first, then Pairs
• Afternoon-only Single Session Games
• Evening-only Single Session Games
• (On Saturday, Two-Session Games are first, followed by single-session 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 Carmicheal 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 may have important 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.)

Race for the overalls!: 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. All events will have a direct link to the ACBL Live page with the complete results. Most two-session events will have, just below the main headline, a few lines of commentary listing the winners of each strat and the route they took to get there. I begin posting the Final Version without these little blurbs and add them in a bit later, so people can see the results first and read my take on them later.

Once a day’s results are posted, I may revise it later if there are late scoring corrections. 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.

Each daily page also has a set of puzzles from Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection, a free online source of brain warmups with endless puzzling fun, a new kind of date-based trivia questions at the top and answers at the bottom, and Tomorrow’s Schedule (which of course, is a virtual copy of the first thing you will see on the page for the following day). I might even include some funny stuff from the internet from the strange bookmarks I’ve collected. Enjoy!

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. 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 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 daytime 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 graphic display of the events of each session, by type, and compare our attendance in 2026 to that of October 2023. A realistic goal is about 60% of the 2018 attendance, which happens to be a target of 571 tables. Maybe we can do even better!

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! We have a lot more color in the pages now, with each page having its own palette. Two years off 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.