[Gerben42]

Can someone explain to me what a Regional and Sectional ACBL tournament is? Are there more categories of tournaments (I know of the Nationals)?
Is it just one tournament or many? How many days?
Are there side games?
How often do they take place within reasonable distance of where you live?

I'd be grateful for answers to these questions.

[scoob]

in my limited experience (1 annual regional regularly, and 1 sectional once):

a regional is usually 5-7 days long with 2 or 3 sessions per day. wide variety tournaments and timelines scheduled throughout taking anywhere from 1 to 4 sessions each (link above to schedule)

a sectional is usually over a weekend with 2 sessions per day. various tournaments on one timeline usually 1 or 2 at most sessions each

[Elianna]

Gerben42, on Apr 18 2005, 07:42 AM, said:

Can someone explain to me what a Regional and Sectional ACBL tournament is? Are there more categories of tournaments (I know of the Nationals)?
Is it just one tournament or many? How many days?
Are there side games?
How often do they take place within reasonable distance of where you live?

I'd be grateful for answers to these questions.

In addition to what Scoob said, a Regional tournament is usually staged by a district (it's not unheard of for two districts to collaborate on one), and each district usually sanctions 2-3 each year, depending on the size (population) of the district. For example, district 14, which covers the northern plains states (the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota) seems to have two a year, one in Minneapolis, and one in Omaha. District 23 (Los Angeles) has in the past varied between 2 and three a year, and is currently debating whether to have three a year, each lasting a week, or two a year, each lasting ten days. There usually seem to be around 2 a month that I deem a reasonable distance (for regionals, this is less than 8 hours driving time).

Sectionals are usually staged by Units (which are smaller than districts, but again the geography seems to depend on the size). Living in Lincoln, NE, there seem to be three sectionals in "reasonable" driving distance (reasonable to me less than three hours drive for sectionals, ie, I don't have to stay overnight): 1 in Lincoln, 2 in Omaha. In LA, there are a lot more, as there are a lot more units very close to each other.

In addition to this, there are Sectional Tournaments at Clubs (STaCs) which take place across districts (sometimes a single district, sometimes a few combined) in which you play a game at the club, but your results get compared to all results played that day (and again, this varies as to how the comparison is actually done).

I hope that this was informative, and sorry it was longwinded.

Edited to add (since I hate >1 posts in a row by the same poster): As scoob has said, both Sectionals and Regionals offer concurrent options of events, with regionals having the most choices at a time. They usually have, in addition to "main events" single session open side games, and single session limited games (for newer players).