ACBL masterspoints online

[pigpenz]

If I play bridge for a week at an ACBL Regional, I would normally expect to win upwards of 100 masterpoints. An average player with an average partner would have little hope of winning so many points at a Regional, but this is as it should be since (as I said above) the more skill you have the more masterpoints you rate to win.

But its interesting if you go back and look at regionals from the 70's very few people could ever win 100 points at a regional...mainly because there wasnt the large amount of Knock Out events as we see now.

 

Back then there were mostly only

1.matchpoint pairs events

2.one knock out event

3.two swiss team events

 

Now in this millenium there are sometimes as many as 6-8 knock out events during one regional and with each knockout event having multiple flights. So we see players of Freds caliber being able to win sometimes 150+ just playing in KO's and players of little ability being able to win 50 sometimes playing in lower flighted events.

 

So the ACBL has found a way to market its product so that players at lower echelons feel like they are winning or at least getting somewhere. That is why we now have Red Ribbon , Silver Ribbon pairs etc.

[awm]

One of the purposes of having a league organization is to maintain some measure of skill and help people to compete against others of similar skill. This is part of promoting the game -- it's not that much fun to play against much weaker or much stronger players all the time. Most of us want a challenge, and to gradually (and hopefully measurably) be able to improve our skills. Some of us aspire to being among the top players and want to be able to progress towards that, whereas others just want to play better than they did last year.

 

Every major league organization maintains some sort of ratings, from tennis to chess to badminton to poker. And most of these organizations have special events or tournaments limited to relative newcomers to help them "get their feet wet" in tournament play without being clobbered by the best of the best.

 

This is the function that masterpoints serve in bridge. Now there are a couple oddities of masterpoints, primarily that they only accumulate over time. However, I think this is necessary to deal with an aging playing population -- it would be depressing for people to watch their "skill level" visibly decline as they age. It should also be mentioned that computing an "accurate" rating for individuals in a pairs event like bridge is a remarkably complex mathematical problem to which no good solutions are known.

 

For the most part, masterpoints serve some purpose in encouraging people to play and allowing for flighted events. Admittedly there are some people who get frustrated, because they have either "too many" or "too few" points to reflect their skill level. And those people at the very top levels of the game (or at the very bottom) find masterpoints relatively meaningless because they are too easy (or too hard) to win. But it's not like masterpoints are some "evil plot" to exploit people -- they're just an attempt to do what every league is supposed to do. Of course there are some unintended side effects in the way they're awarded (for example encouraging people to play KOs instead of pairs). Even in Fred's case, I wonder how many points he would win at a regional if he and Brad played open pairs every day. Perhaps not his usual 100+.... :)

[barmar]

I also don't care much about masterpoints on an absolute basis, but I still find them a useful tool. For instance, when I go to an NABC, at the end of the tournament I request a printout of the total masterpoints I won that week. I can compare that to previous NABCs, and tell whether I've done better or worse than in the past.

 

However, one must be careful when making these comparisons -- it's not necessarily apples to apples. At national tournaments, many of the events I play in are bracketed KOs. As a result, the more masterpoints I (and my teammates) have, the harder the competition is; if we do well, we get more masterpoints than when I was able to play in lower brackets, but the competition is accordingly harder. Also, as I've advanced as a player, I tend to enter even harder events, like Blue Ribbon Pairs, North American Swiss, and even the Vanderbilt/Spingold Teams; these are fun events to play in, but I don't expect to win many masterpoints in them (I was amazed 2 years ago when I qualified for the 2nd day of the Blue Ribbons -- unfortunately, my partner apparently forgot how to play bridge overnight).