Not you too Alan! I thought you enjoyed running such a large, multi-dimensional successful club. You seem to understand it so well.
Not a day does by when I don't enjoy some aspect of what I'm doing. I look back and think how lucky I've been to have found a way to combine work, a career, and a hobby rolled into one.

That is exactly why having a rating within a rating is so important. Having the ability to up your Life-Time rating (highest 25 results in a row) leaves open the ability of even weak players to dramatically improve their score in a short period of time. Certainly it is less meaningful than your current rating, but it is more exciting.

Several really good points…
Weighted results with near term results weighted more heavily.
Partnerships made on rating rather than Masterpoints makes perfect sense especially when it comes to newer talented players.
Give players a better understanding on if their results are improving over time.

One that's been left out…marketing (yes marketing Richard). Having a system that's different from Masterpoints may be huge. As has been pointed out by Randy, many club players play for the fun of it. That's because MP's have lost their meaning. Many regular club players are LM's ten times over and have nothing more to strive for MP wise. Someone 70 years old with 5,500 points knows they will never make it to 10,000, which is really the only meaningful next milestone. Having a brand new shiny toy to play with may start their competitive juices going again.

The ACBL is a nonprofit organization. So be it. Ray and Jim are perfect examples of why nonprofit does not necessary work as a model for its member clubs. Honors supports almost fifty people, most quite handsomely. I don't think you'll see posts like Jim's from any of my employees or partners in the near future. Maybe it's time for ACBL to begin champion and giving credit where credit is due. For and non are both three letter words. Non hasn't been working well recently. How about giving for a chance? Enough with touting how inexpensive it is to play at so and so's club. So and so may not feel so blessed, may be on their last legs, and may have no way out because the climate established by ACBL has instilled in so many club players the idea that $5 card fees is all it's worth for a session of bridge in a brick and mortar establishment. Is it any wonder that 100 club sanction holders walk away from their sanctions every year, year after year, for going on twenty years now. Jim and Ray are just the latest to pack it in.
We need a real business model, not some idealistic mumbo-jumbo about volunteerism and sainthood. For Jim and Ray it's too late. How many more Jim and Rays will it take before ACBL comes to that realization?

Chinese poker….brings back memories. Haven't thought about it in decades.

How about two 4-of-a-kind in one hand? Haven't found many of those.

As a former poker player I check for 5-card straight flushes of any kind. Hard enough to get one with 13 cards. Try with 5 or 7. Anyone know the odds? Had one the other day playing in a Common Game.

8 is to 23 as x is to 12. x isn't anywhere near 9.

Aces and Knaves I've seen. I felt they certainly should have placed less emphasis on it. That said, it was a very positive piece and very well done. I have a link to the trailer on our home page.

Not having sat through the film, I accept both of your critiques and am happy the points you made came through.

Thank you.
From the article I learned that one of the participants actually hated bridge right from the start yet was forced to continue. How's that a recipe for promoting our game? Or was that not the film's intention from the start? Did the Ed Foundation demand that the film be politically correct? Present all sides? There is already enough negative material out there about us, our age, our game and its complexity. Did we have to spend our own money reinforcing that image?

Bridge is not for everyone, neither is golf or the opera. Like us, both have passionate, yet relatively small devotees. I haven't seen the Golf Channel or the Met purposely going out of their way trying to shoot themselves in the foot. Why did we?

Perhaps the experiment was flawed to begin with. I would have put the actors through a few lessons before hiring them on. Bridge is not for everyone. Only a little more than half of our evening and weekend students continue on past the six session introductory “Taste of Bridge” course. Some drop out after just three or four lessons. These evening and weekenders are, as a group, younger than our weekday morning students and less likely to feel the NEED to learn the game. If it doesn't resonate with them, they're gone. Too many other options.
Sounds like it was sheer torture for at least two of these actors.

Young people today are really into games. Games cafes are springing up in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Games clubs flourish on college campuses. Let's go after this group. Bridge's complexity should be championed. It is the ultimate game of strategy and tactics. Rather than hide from that, we should embrace it.

Hey kids, ready for a real challenge?!

Perhaps ACBL did look at the finished product and simply passed.

Again, I've only seen the trailer, but it sounded like the four were taught and then locked in cages for five days with a pack of wolfs (any Regional, anywhere in the country). Now for some of us that may be Nirvana. For these young, newly minted players, it was anything but. Did you see the guy putting his head down when he told us there was still four more days of sheer torture ahead of him?
Maybe teaching the game and then having them play social sessions with a few dozen of our top young pros, beer included, might have led to a different, more uplifting outcome. That's the movie I'd like to see.

Are we trying to introduce bridge or duplicate? Bridge, at its height had millions of players. Duplicate NEVER got above a couple hundred thousand. It's a numbers game. Teach 100 players. Some percent will take to our game. Most won't. From that group, some will become duplicate players, most won't. Starting with only a pool of four, as they did in Kids Table, I would expect at least two would not find the game at all of interest and one of the remaining two might take to duplicate. That's a negative ratio of 3 to 1. Is there any wonder so much negativity came through?

Michael,
About 4 or 5 minutes into the video I began to rethink whether bridge was really all that complicated after all. If you could follow Wheaton for even that length of time, kudos to you. More to the point, if you could follow it, AND WANTED TO, you should have no trouble with a similar presentation of bridge.
Which brings up the next point.

If anyone does go back and view this, if it cost one million dollars to produce and draws one million views….that's what I would call getting your bang for your buck.
Maybe we just need to repackage bridge. Update, if you will. Jacks become Knaves, Queens, sorcerers, Kings get different ancient mythical names and Aces become various gods. Winning a trick becomes…well I'll leave that to your imagination except to say that the winning entry will receive partial branding rights when and if this idea takes hold.

That's part of multi.

How about multi?

I haven't seen the Kids Table. The goal of having these kids competing at the highest level after a year reminds me of my first beginner bridge book's publisher's idea of how my book was to be written. I was to teach bridge to two writers who she brought together on the project. I was to teach them the way I taught my regular students and they in turn would take that experience and write the book.
I kid you not. And that's exactly what happened. All except the part about writing the book.

The trailer is puzzling. Especially when it comes to age. It's all over the place. I can't even figure out if it is meant to be pro or anti bridge. What I love about the game at every level is that you're in a place of intellectual curiosity with like minded people of every age. Maybe tilted older, but young at heart and spirit with plenty of fight left in us. What a great experience this is for younger players. See adults and seniors as still having it and enjoying it. All of us who started in college were in the same place. Have we forgotten that at 20, 45 and 50 year olds looked about the same to us as 70 year olds? I bet that's all they were back then. At the time I thought yes, they may be older and old, but they were sharp and fun and tough and helpful.

I'd like for us to try positioning bridge to the current games playing world (huge BTW, both video and board) as the ultimate game of pure strategy and tactics. “You play Magic or Catan? Well bridge is Magic and Catan on steroids. Are YOU up to the challenge?”