[mike777]

What a very exciting story. 67th seeded team is in the round of 8. Of course not one story about them in today's bulletin.

I know nothing about them. I hear gossip such as they used to be on the chinese Nat team and are in their 30's...but this is just guessing.

Latest I heard is they are phd students in cs at MIT?

I wonder what system they play, have they played in other big events, etc?

Anyone know anything about them?

btw as a side question, is the Spingold a timed event? Are there time penalties, some of these teams seem pretty slow.

[joshs]

I know all 4 members of the team pretty well and have partnered two of them. 2 of them are a partnership in DC, (Hailong and JJ) and have played together for about 8 years (The only time I played with Hailong, which was 6 years ago when I lived in DC, we had a 65% game in a very tough field. He is a fine player.) but don't play in nationals very often. Jiang Gu from new jersey has at least 1 national championship (with Nik Demirov) and a number of top 20 finishes over the last few years. He is an excellent player (but really slow!).
The 4'th member of the team is from georgia (former soviet union) and lives now in San Diego, but used to live in DC.

[barmar]

In answer to your second question, it's supposedly a timed event, but they're generally pretty liberal about it, particularly in the late rounds. The same is true for the Vanderbilt. Of the big 3 team events on the ACBL calendar, only the Reisinger has strongly-enforced time limits, because it's Board-A-Match, and slow play would hold up several tables. It's not unusual for the final of the KO events to finish at 2am.

[glen]

In Saturday's bulletin they provide a few short details on the Ao team ("Ao and Wang are from the Washington DC area. Gu is from New Jersey and Chechelashvili from San Diego CA ... Ao is a software engineer, Wang a scientist who works for NASA"). btw somebody said that Ao was a fine poker player, but I said that AA was better - you might have to be a poker player to get that.

Also in the bulletin we find out "Henner-Welland defends Open Swiss title". Well this defending will have to be done without playing in it.

Back to the Spingold, we find out: "The Russian-Polish squad led by Gromov(Aleksandr Dubinin, Cezary Balicki, Adam Zmudzinski) turned a tight match into a rout with a big fourth quarter. Leading by only 17 with 16 deals to play, Gromov smoked their opponents (Jim Mahaffey, Mark Lair, Jhao Jie, Fu Zhong, Fredrik Nystrom, Peter Bertheau) 74-37 in the last set to win 192-138.

One wonders about the bracket sheet at:
Spingold Bracket Sheet

Which has Gromov "smoking" by 4.

Back to the the Ao team - the bulletin has a hand where Ao claims +920 in 6♥

[barmar]

I have a feeling that someone misread a 4 for a 9 or vice versa. I don't know which is correct, but the bracket sheet in the bulletin also says 192.

[DenisO]

It was shown on Vugraph - Gromov won by 4 (142 - 138) - exciting with Mahaffey gaining 20 Imps over the last 7 boards but didn't quite make it.

Denis

[paulg]

I met one of the Ao team in the airport Sunday lunchtime and we watched some of the final together.

Apparently his original return ticket was for the Wednesday morning.

[barmar]

I can beat that, Hamman was sitting in the seat in front of me on the plane Monday morning. We were sitting in 1st class, so all the other bridge players had to pass by and got to congratulate him on their way to their seats. I think we had enough that we could have had a little team game ourselves on the flight.