[Siegmund]

At least in District 19, "top bracket of KOs" meant only one bracket no matter how many MPs you had, and it was very rare to see anybody play up. I was on the D19 board in the late 90s, and floated a proposal to have one full-fledged beginning-to-end Mid-chart event, and had a list of several people who said they would come up from California etc for the whole week if we had one such event... and the motion got defeated something like 2-9.

Believe me, they acted like they were making a HUGE concession to allow it in the top bracket only -- and they were doing that in the knowledge that there were very unlikely to be any Midchart conventions used often even there. They wanted to welcome pros practicing for international events, but warn young punks who wanted to experiment with their systems that they were not welcome. It was not an accident that they said top-bracket-only and made absolutely no effort to allow or encourage playing up.

Come to think of it, even that one concession might not have been made, had a team of 4 rather prominent Australians not come to one of our tournaments in Victoria, BC, and received quite a hostile welcome when they tried to play one of their simpler systems.

[thomas c]

we dont play acbl events anymore. part is because internet play is so available. my wife is from austria and when we visit we play quite a bit everything is allowed and alerted in a foreign language(to me) i think it is fun and i love to play there. in acbl land they wont let us play up ( even in a national we attended years ago) because we dont have many masterpoints as all of you know mps really have little to do with how well you play sinc it is mostly an attendance record. we are too old to have 2 systems. shoot, we forget stuff even now. so we choose to not play acbl anymore. i think there are a lot of people like us