[Coronet]

This map shows all 2009 regionals in the ACBL's directory, and will stay up-to-date as they add more. Use it to plan your year.

[matmat]

cool

[TimG]

Pretty cool. Don't know how accurate you had hoped to be, but you have the Waterbury CT regional in a town about 20 miles away from Waterbury.

[JoAnneM]

That map is fascinating. Look how many Regionals Florida has, and not one Regional in all of Utah, including Salt Lake City, or Wyoming, South or North Dakota, Maine, Vermont, or West Virginia. You can certainly tell where the population is centered, especially the retirees.

[TimG]

JoAnneM, on Dec 22 2008, 12:08 PM, said:

That map is fascinating. Look how many Regionals Florida has, and not one Regional in all of Utah, including Salt Lake City, or Wyoming, South or North Dakota, Maine, Vermont, or West Virginia. You can certainly tell where the population is centered, especially the retirees.

Maine had a regional three years ago, Vermont 2 years ago. Given attendance at those and the leanings of those now in charge in New England, it will be a while before either gets another regional.

One of the troubles is that in New England the two most successful regionals are held in late June and Labor Day Weekend. The other two are held in November and February. It's hard to justify moving one of the money makers to Northern New England, and expecting people to travel to Vermont or Maine in November or February is sort of silly. The last two Maine regionals were held in November and it snowed during both.

BTW, I was President of the district when the contracts for the most recent regionals in Vermont and Maine were signed. It is my opinion that some regionals should move around to cover less populated areas of a District where there is still interest in bridge. It was my hope that regionals would be held in Vermont and Maine once every 3-4 years. But, it seems that was a (small) minority opinion and there are no Vermont or Maine regionals currently planned (that I know of).

[Coronet]

I'm glad you all enjoyed it. This one does the same thing for sectionals. Because there are so many you need to zoom in a ways before you can see everything in an area.

As an alternative view, I opened them both in Google Earth, so here you can see all sectionals (yellow) and regionals (red) in and near the continental US.



TimG - I'm not surprised that it misplaced some things. All the locating is being done by a computer based on the ACBL descriptions, and the computer is far from perfect. But it is good enough to let you see some general trends. Still I wouldn't recommend getting your driving directions from it.

Aaron

[TimG]

Aaron,

Is there anyway to sort by date? Or, to display all January regionals, for instance?

[Coronet]

Tim,

Sorting by date shouldn't be hard, but I don't know how to do it off-hand. If I figure it out I'll add it to this thread. Displaying by month is pretty easy, because the big maps combine all the ACBL's monthly tournament listings. Here are all the regionals and sectionals by month of 2009:

Jan: Regional Sectional
Feb: Regional Sectional
Mar: Regional Sectional
Apr: Regional Sectional
May: Regional Sectional
Jun: Regional Sectional
Jul: Regional Sectional
Aug: Regional Sectional
Sep: Regional Sectional
Oct: Regional Sectional
Nov: Regional Sectional
Dec: Regional Sectional

The geocoder has a habit of locating ST@C games in Ireland or Brazil, which should obviously be ignored. Or we should start sections there.

Aaron

[JoAnneM]

TimG, on Dec 22 2008, 07:00 PM, said:

JoAnneM, on Dec 22 2008, 12:08 PM, said:

That map is fascinating.  Look how many Regionals Florida has, and not one Regional in all of Utah, including Salt Lake City, or Wyoming, South or North Dakota, Maine, Vermont, or West Virginia.  You can certainly tell where the population is centered, especially the retirees.

Maine had a regional three years ago, Vermont 2 years ago. Given attendance at those and the leanings of those now in charge in New England, it will be a while before either gets another regional.

One of the troubles is that in New England the two most successful regionals are held in late June and Labor Day Weekend. The other two are held in November and February. It's hard to justify moving one of the money makers to Northern New England, and expecting people to travel to Vermont or Maine in November or February is sort of silly. The last two Maine regionals were held in November and it snowed during both.

BTW, I was President of the district when the contracts for the most recent regionals in Vermont and Maine were signed. It is my opinion that some regionals should move around to cover less populated areas of a District where there is still interest in bridge. It was my hope that regionals would be held in Vermont and Maine once every 3-4 years. But, it seems that was a (small) minority opinion and there are no Vermont or Maine regionals currently planned (that I know of).

The Regionals are listed by date at the ACBL website www.acbl.org Click on Tournaments.

We face a similar problem in our area (District 20, of which I am currently President). Players want Regionals in their outlying areas so they won't have to travel for their gold points but they don't realize how much it costs to put on a Regional and that they do have to make a profit. We expect our three larger Regionals to carry our two rotating smaller Regionals that make little or no money, plus pay for our District publication, N/A events, Education and I/N expenses, and admin costs.

Now there is a movement by the uninformed to dump one of the larger Regionals and add another small one. I can sympathize with their motivations but when you look at the money, which someone has to do, it is just not possible. Then we are the bad guys. Oh well, that's why we get the big bucks. LOL

[CSGibson]

Jo Anne, I'm in district 20 (I think we played against your team in a knock-out at the Portland regional last year), and I am very happy with the tournaments that our district provides. I live in the Portland area, and I have not heard one peep of discontent from the bridge players in that area. Good luck, and all hail the president!

[cherdano]

Cool map.

[cherdano]

Coronet, on Dec 22 2008, 01:24 PM, said:

I'm glad you all enjoyed it. This one does the same thing for sectionals. Because there are so many you need to zoom in a ways before you can see everything in an area.

The link doesn't work for me.

[awm]

cherdano, on Dec 23 2008, 03:47 AM, said:

The link doesn't work for me.

When I tried it, it took several minutes to come up. But it did work eventually.

[Gerben42]

Well, I think this is a nice service. Around here, it is not very easy to know about all the planned tournaments. The regionals are easy to find, but smaller ones are not.

[barmar]

cherdano, on Dec 23 2008, 03:47 AM, said:

Coronet, on Dec 22 2008, 01:24 PM, said:

I'm glad you all enjoyed it.  This one does the same thing for sectionals.  Because there are so many you need to zoom in a ways before you can see everything in an area.

The link doesn't work for me.

Me, either. The map comes up, but over on the left it says "File not found at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipe...."

[Coronet]

Sorry guys, the map seems to disappear after about 10 hours. I hadn't realized it would do this.

These maps: Regionals Sectionals will always work. But they will not stay up-to-date as the ACBL updates its website.

These maps: Regionals Sectionals Regionals In A Month Sectionals In A Month will always work, and will stay up-to-date. But they are a little uglier. Choose your poison.

If there is a way to fix the pretty maps I'll post it.

Aaron

[barmar]

The google Sectional map seems to has problems with the "More Details" links. When you click on them, it opens an email to //www.acbl.org/tournament-calendar/sectional/2009/<address> instead of just <address>. Also, in the list of tourneys on the left, a number of them have "&hellip" after the location and date.

This probably comes from you having to use a pipe to parse this info out of the ACBL's human-oriented HTML page. Someone should ask them to make the data available as XML so it can be parsed easily.

[JoAnneM]

You seem to know what you need, and that someone could be you.

webmaster@acbl.org

[barmar]

I don't really NEED this. I don't go to any sectionals or regionals that aren't within driving distance, and most of them are advertised in my unit newsletter.

The folks who put these pages together are more aware of what's currently on the web site, because they had to write the pipes to extract it and can make better constructive criticism to the webmaster.