The 2026 Puget Sound 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: The Lynnwood Convention Center is now called the Lynnwood Event Center but it is the same location as previous versions of this tournament: just north of Seattle, just south of the I-5/I-405 interchange, at 3711 196th St. SW. The map at the right has the LEC as the purple dot.

Evenings Off!: The Puget Sound Regional switched to morning/afternoon start times in 2024, with weekday start times of 11am and 4pm (10am / 3pm start on Saturday, 10am on Sunday), avoiding weekday peak hours on local roads. For local players used to the old 1pm / 7pm times, this means several things to get used to:

• Driving to and from the tournament for a 11am or 4pm start avoids the final stages of rush hour getting here and going home. Weekday afternoon games should end at about 7:20pm, by which time rush hour will be mostly done.
• There will not be a lot of time to eat between sessions. Those wishing to take advantage of the many restaurants nearby may wish to change their plans to a light snack between sessions and a big post-game meal, armed with lots of companions, two hand records (or a cellphone that can display ACBL Live results) and twice as many stories! This plan will still get you home or back to the hotel room in plenty of time to get rested up for the next day’s start at 11am. The Lunch Cart will be open from 11am to 5pm for hungry players, but might be quite crowded in the period between 2:30 and 4:00, from the end of the morning session to the start of the afternoon session. Going out between sessions is not likely to be a viable option except for very nearby fast food.
• Monday’s Opening Day event is a Warmup Open Swiss Teams starting at 4:00pm.
• The main events are at 11am and 4pm every weekday (an hour earlier on Saturday/Sunday), including two-session Open and Gold Rush pairs, two-day knockout teams starting Tuesday and Thursday Afternoon, with Bracketed Round-Robin Teams on Wednesday and Friday, opposite the semifinals and finals of the knockouts that began the day before, and a new Two Day Qualifying/Final Swiss Teams on Saturday-Sunday.
• Sunday is Teams-Only. There are two events, the finals of the two-day Swiss Teams, and a Bracketed Round Robin Teams for everyone else.
• No more Side Games, but Open Pairs and Gold Rush Pairs sellers will allow you to buy single-session entries. To win the big overall awards you must buy a two-session entry though.

Driving: the site is very close to I-5’s main Lynnwood exit, 196th St. SW, which is less than a mile south of the northern junction of I-5 and I-405. Driving in from the north, you exit I-5 at the 196th St SW exit, and you're almost there: the Lynnwood Event Centre is on the northwest corner of the first traffic light off of the highway at 36th Ave. Go through the light and turn right just past the building and you will find ample free parking: watch for signs leading to additional parking across 36th Ave. if there is none available. From the south it is a little trickier: exit 181B sends you east on Alderwood Mall Pkway for a few blocks, then turns north and at the traffic light you turn left on 196th St SW and go west, over I-5, and you meet up with the folks exiting from the north: the site will be on your right, past the first intersection on the other side of the highway overpass.

Transit: Lynnwood City Center Station, about 10-15 minutes walk from the playing site, now is the endpoint for both the 1 Line (to/from Downtown Seattle, Sea-Tac, and beyond to Federal Way) and the 2 Line (to/from Downtown Seattle and eastward to Mercer Island, Bellevue, and Renton) with light rail trains arrving and leaving quite often. Sound Transit has all the details you’ll need. Community Transit’s 166 route goes very close to the playing site, starting in Edmonds at the Amtrak station (a pleasant and easy way to get to Lynnwood if coming by train) and going to the Ash Way Park & Ride and beyond to the Silver Firs area. The stops on 196th St SW closest to the playing site are at 36 Ave W (going westbound) and 40 Ave W (going eastbound). There are many other bus routes that connect with Lynnwood City Center Station, about a 10-15 minute walk from the site.

Restaurants and Shops: It is no exaggeration to say that you could play at this tournament in every session, never walk more than six blocks from the playing site, and never eat twice at the same restaurant! There are at least forty restaurants within easy walking distance of the playing site, and every time I look there are more new ones! It’s definitely worth a close look on your phone’s mapping app to see what is available; the map listed above shows only about half of the nearby places. Just as an example, the building containing Fork Mediterranean Grill now has two more new places (only one of which shows on the map at this zoom level) close enough to walk to between sessions. A few blocks further west is a large Fred Meyer grocery/department store, a few blocks east over the I-5 overpass is a Whole Foods market, and the sprawling Alderwood Mall, with dozens more nearby eateries, is about half a mile north.

However, the morning-afternoon start times mean that to enjoy all this fully, you’ll want to plan some evening outings, preferably with bridge friends and hand records! Another between-sessions option for some of the closer places might be to order during the morning session break for pickup at 2:45, and find a place to enjoy it quickly between sessions. But tournament organizers want to remind you that the onsite food and drink depends upon enough players buying. Please take advantage of the LEC lunch cart rather than risk being late for the afternoon session!

Tournament Site: Late change: this year we are downstairs, after a scheduling mixup. I am told that the main entrance works and there are stairs and an elevator to get downstairs. Also, the playing area, directly underneath our usual spot which needs to be kept cool, is VERY cool, be sure to bring a sweater or a jacket! The Lynnwood Event Centre’s upper level will be used for the tournament, and the main entrance is on the northwest corner, nearest the free parking. As you walk in, you will see past the LEC reception area on your left, a door (one of many) leading to the playing area, but continuing straight will lead you to the TournTables bookstore in the corner, then left to washrooms, and the Partnership and Hospitality Desk. Players will need to bring in coffee and snacks they want to have available during play. Please be proactive in avoiding messes that will frustrate LEC staff, so that we can continue to enjoy this excellent playing site. Inside the playing area, there are usually two entry-buying stations, one for pairs near the front of the room, and one for teams near the back of the room.

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. US$4 extra will be charged for unpaid or inactive members, but this is easily avoided by getting a guest membership or re-activating your current membership at acbl.org. For purchasing entries on site, directors will need to know, for pairs and knockout teams, an approximate masterpoint total for your pair or team, and if you have more than four players on your 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 knockout (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!  Sadly, online sales seem to be limited to NABCs for the near future, despite working fairly well in this area when they were opened up to all tournaments.

Freezing Up: I have found that many bridge players need this important reminder: the site is air-conditioned for the comfort of a large group of people, all of whom have very different ideas of what “room temperature” should be. Outdoor temperatures in late August may well be very hot, and many of us have gotten used to the heat by now. It really is a good idea to bring a light sweater if air-conditioning makes you shiver. Large sites are very difficult to maintain a temperature that is comfortable to everyone, especially when the body heat of several hundred players enters and exits the playing area several times a day. Requesting a change in the AC level in a large hall is not something that takes immediate effect. Most modern buildings are constantly monitoring the temperature and making the changes you are demanding before you even ask. The best solution is to be prepared and have a light sweater or jacket with you.

Dates, Times, Events: 11:00 am and 4:00 pm are the start times from Tuesday thru Friday. The tournament begins on Monday August 17 at 4:00pm with a one-session Open Warmup Swiss Teams. There are no evening sessions at the tournament. On Saturday and Sunday we start at 10am and 3pm. On Sunday August 23, play begins at 10:00 am with two team events: a Two-Day Swiss Teams for those who qualified the day before, and a Bracketed Round Robin Swiss Teams for everyone else. Sessions should end 3¼ - 3½ hours after they begin, on Sunday things end by about 5:30pm in the teams, perhaps earlier. The main sessions are (late) morning and (late) afternoon, with Open and Gold Rush 0-750 two-session Pairs, and team events. There are two two-day Knockout Team events: Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday, played Soloway-style with a qualifying round-robin Swiss on the first day to produce four semifinalists in each bracket. Be sure to have one player stay if your team may finish first so you can choose your semifinal opponent, and be aware that if you do qualify for the semis you will play two matches on the second day, win or lose. There are also two-session bracketed team events on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday (0-4000), as well as on Sunday for everyone, including those who have not qualified for the two-day Swiss Final.

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 3:15pm on selected evenings will be announced when we hear more details.

New to Regional Tournaments? Welcome! Newer players can play in the daily two-session 0-750 Gold Rush events (both players under 750), morning-afternoon Tuesday to Saturday, where single-session entries are available. 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 even more directed 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 all those years 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 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 Seattle-area players in many pleasant visits), let’s be sure to silence our gadgets. For today’s cellphones this often 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 or the internet or a watch, gadgets you’ve left inside a coat somewhere, all can be unexpected sudden 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 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:

• Two Session Morning and Afternoon Games
• Knockout Team Results
• Other 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 as soon as I can, bit by bit. First, I will update the table count page and masterpoints page, and add that information into the page for the day just completed, removing the Today’s Schedule section (since all of those events are now complete) and creating a Preliminary Version. Next is the processing of the results for the day, which in a tournament of this size takes the computer a few minutes as it automates its way through a process which juggles very large files and creates some (a lot of) HTML to add to the results section. A few oddities may fall through the cracks and force me to do a bit of work getting the data that the program was unable to extract, but by an hour or so after everyone leaves there should be a final version posted, with all of the results from the day, as well as brackets for incomplete knockouts. Here is what the Final Version of each daily page will contain once the process is complete:

• Table Counts thus far and a comparison to previous tournaments
• Masterpoint Leaders at the end of the day (not including events that are not yet complete)
• Noteworthy News Items Received — tournament chair Marla Patterson and other members of the Lynnwood 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!
• A results section with events in roughly this order:
• Two Session Pair Games: Open Pairs, Gold Rush Pairs
• Two Session Swiss or Bracketed Teams
• Single Session Swiss Teams
• Completed Knockouts
• Rosters for Surviving Teams in Knockouts that are not yet complete
• Other Games
• 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. Many 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.
• 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, some sort of trivia question set at the top and an answer 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).
• For the 2026 Lynnwood tournament, we have a zany seven-part true story about something that happened in Canada in 2008 which we will release one part per day. Be sure to check the daily pages each day to follow the progress and have a good laugh!
• I might even include some funny stuff from the internet from the strange bookmarks I’ve collected. Enjoy!

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 (sometimes CTRL + F5 works better for particularly stubborn browsers) 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. 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. bm@mcbruce.ca is the new 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 2026 to that of 2025. A realistic goal is about 60% of the 2019 attendance, which happens to be a target of 771½ 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 the traditional Sounders FC colors to honor the team I fear will recover from their current slump and challenge my hometown Vancouver Whitecaps in the playoffs this year. (Actually, since Apple TV+ began streaming MLS games, teams have been wearing all kinds of new colors and I seldom see Seattle in their traditional green anymore....) We have a lot more color in the pages post-pandemic, 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 new e-mail address above) with reports of errors or if something isn’t working for you.