The Bhartia Memorial 2023 tournament came to a successful conclusion yesterday and, I am sure, everybody who came there enjoyed themselves thoroughly. I am sharing a few observations on the event that are over and above the results which are by now known to everybody. Some of the photographs (and any videos) are thanks to Simon Stocken who provided me with a huge stock to choose from.
Swiss Teams
The Swiss Teams event saw an impressive turn out of 60 teams. As a director, I have to say it is far greater fun when there is greater participation albeit more physically tiring. Some of the odd things I noticed as a director were
A top player complaining that his opponent won two tricks with the Club King! I literally had to suppress guffaws while asking him why he did not notice it during the play? As also, why did his partner, who was dummy, not notice it either!!!
Four top teams, managed to sit in the same direction during the event. This actually cost one of them qualification to the knock outs. This happened inspite of the instructions issued at the start of each round (shown below).
Meenu Dugal
Among the list of qualifiers to the knock outs was a team called Chef's Table. Formed by Meenu Dugal, the Chef, as it were, the team consists of Soumadeep Ghosh, Arya Chakraborty, Shouvik Das and Saptarshi Chanda. Meenu has been working with this team of juniors for a long time now (at least since the last HCL that I am aware) and I must say that I am really glad that her efforts to promote juniors in Indian Bridge are slowly, but surely bearing fruit.
We are also attaching here a small video of Subrata Saha scoring a match. This is just for flavor and nothing else.
The knock outs, unfortunately saw a couple of unsavory incidents happening in the later stages. We hope that players manage to keep their emotions in check at the bridge table and only focus on playing the game to the best of their not inconsiderable abilities.
Match Point Pairs
Pranab Bardhan and Shibnath Dey Sarkar completed a hat trick of wins in this event. We congratulate them for this achievement and hope to see them on the India team for the Bermuda Bowl soon.
Tilakraj and Taral
Once again, it was heartening to note the presence of two junior pairs Shouvik Das and Arya Chakraborty (mentioned earlier) and Tilakraj Chowdhury and Taral Rodrigues. I unfortunately could only photograph the latter pair.
The former did extremely well to finish 9th in the overall standings.
We hope that all of you continue to perform well and better your results in upcoming events!
Areas of Improvement
I am presenting below a few complaints which I heard being voiced by various people during the event.
The biggest complaint in the playing area was that most people found the room too cold. While the organizers did make efforts to get the temperature up, they faced little success in the matter. It is hard to control the temperature of large, centrally air conditioned spaces.
My humble suggestion is that participants would do well to come with adequate preparation to cover themselves appropriately in the event that they face such challenges.
The biggest complaint from the people not at the venue was the unavailability of time updates on the results of events. There were some issues with the event website and eventually, all the results were published here.
We have hyperlinked the page for ready reference.
Parting Thoughts
All in all, from a personal point of view, it was a wonderful, if thoroughly exhausting event. The directorial team was presented with an extremely dapper jacket which made them immediately visible to all the players.
The organizers took extremely good care of the event management team. It is hard to describe the specifics really, but for me, this was the first time I have worked an event and parted feeling completely good about having done so. I would like to thank Mr. Anand Samant for this.
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It was indeed a good event and we enjoyed a lot. Few drawbacks will always be there even if you manage things so well, you cant make everyone happy 😊