2008 USBF Junior Trials in Las Vegas

[TimG]

Glad the ACBL saw the error in reducing the field but this sort of thing has happened to me a million times.

I've heard of the five and six year college plans. But, the million year plan?

[hrothgar]

Today's good news :)

The ACBL Intercollegiate finals will be held on Thursday and Friday, July 17 & 18 (if the days and dates don't match, trust me on the days, not on the dates). Therefore, the FISU trials will be Saturday & Sunday, July 19 & 20 (ditto). Players in the Intercollegiates will be encouraged to play in the FISU trials, either on their Intercollegiate team or on other teams. Unless the turnout for the FISU trials is significantly lower than we hope, it will be used to select both of the USBF's teams for the 2008 FISU event.

More good news - there will be 8 teams in the Intercollegiate finals. Thursday will be a complete Round Robin. I think Friday will be a KO with the top 4 teams qualifying, but that's just my guess.

Geeze. Why go from 8 to 4 to 8? This really bugs me due to what happened to my team last year. Glad the ACBL saw the error in reducing the field but this sort of thing has happened to me a million times.

I echo KFay's confusion

 

Running a round robin to reduce an 8 team field to 4 doesn't make any sense...

 

I'm almost positive that running a series of short Round Robin matches will significantly degrade the accuracy of the event. Its much better to allocate two full days to a straight KO. You'll have more than enough time to add an additional round to the event and also lengthen the number of boards played each round.

 

I'm 99% sure that this can be demonstrated using a Monte Carlo simulation.

 

In all seriousness. This is (supposedly) a championship event. It shouldn't be designed as a crap shoot.

[helene_t]

Running a round robin to reduce an 8 team field to 4 doesn't make any sense...

 

I'm almost positive that running a series of short Round Robin matches will significantly degrade the accuracy of the event.  Its much better to allocate two full days to a straight KO.  You'll have more than enough time to add an additional round to the event and also lengthen the number of boards played each round.

 

I'm 99% sure that this can be demonstrated using a Monte Carlo simulation.

Why? Let me argue the opposite. Suppose there are two strong teams that might as well flip a coin instead of playing a short match. Then what you don't want is those two teams to meet in an early phase of the KO where the matches are shorter. In a round robin they are bound both to end among the best 3 which means that they will not meet before the final. Besides, with an RR you can improve the accuracy of later matches through a carry-over.

 

I have here made the assumptions that

- relative RR results are adequate surrogates for a head-on

- RR is not more expensive per board than KO

- The final would be longer than the semi- and quarterfinals

 

Those assumptions could be criticized but it's not obvious to me that they are inferior to some model that would favor a complete KO.

[david_c]

It's nothing to do with me, but I've got to disagree with Richard - the format seems ideal. With a straight KO a relatively weak team could get drawn against a very strong team and their only experience of the event will be getting hammered. Having a round-robin ensures that everyone gets to play at least one day in the main event, and gets to meet everyone else. I don't even think it makes much difference to the "accuracy" of the event - the semi-final and final are only reduced by 25% in length. But who cares about accuracy anyway? It's for the trials that accuracy would be more important.

[Gerben42]

I am happy to do some MC simulations again, of course I will include a parameter that we are talking about junior bridge --> more swings :)

[mycroft]

I like the double-knockout. Yes, it's a pain, yes, it causes issues with timing and byes, it takes longer, and nobody knows how to run one, but it does do a good job of balancing "one and out" with "draw hit 1v2, which meant the final was the first round".

 

Making it work is an exercise for the reader.

[hrothgar]

I am happy to do some MC simulations again, of course I will include a parameter that we are talking about junior bridge --> more swings :)

Hi Gerben

 

I'd certainly appreciate seeing some real results. (One of these days I'll write the necessary code in MATLAB runs this through the Statistics Toolbox and the Optimization Toolbox and see what spits out).

 

In any case, from my perspective, the best design criteria is measuring how often the tournament identifies the best team. I'm not really concerned about the rank ordering of teams 2-8.

 

I'm not sure what folks are planning for the conditions of contest. In general, a two session 7 round Swiss Type format uses either 7 or eight board rounds. If we assume that the event will last for three sessions we could probably increase the round length to 12 boards. (I think that this would be a reasonable starting assumption)...

 

As for the KO matches, I think that we could have considerable flexibility in designing the length of the different rounds.

 

I'd start by assuming something like the following

 

Two Day schedule

 

Round of 8 = 1x32 board session

Round of 4 = 2x32 board sessions

Round of 2 = 3x32 board sessions

 

One Day schedule

 

Round of 4 = 1x32 board sessions with seeding from the Round Robin

Round of 2 = 2x32 board sessions

[Finch]

Running a round robin to reduce an 8 team field to 4 doesn't make any sense...

 

I'm almost positive that running a series of short Round Robin matches will significantly degrade the accuracy of the event. Its much better to allocate two full days to a straight KO. You'll have more than enough time to add an additional round to the event and also lengthen the number of boards played each round.

 

I'm 99% sure that this can be demonstrated using a Monte Carlo simulation.

i'm sorry but an mc simulation won't "prove" anything. I'm pretty certain i can demonstrate that any (vaguely sane) format i happen to prefer is 'best'; it will depend on the characteristcs of the teams concerned.

[helene_t]

i'm sorry but an mc simulation won't "prove" anything. I'm pretty certain i can demonstrate that any (vaguely sane) format i happen to prefer is 'best'; it will depend on the characteristcs of the teams concerned.

I think you exaggerate a little. Some tournament forms exist for weird historical reasons or because of other success criteria than accuracy (see e.g. David's post). But of course an MC simulation only settles the issue given whatever assumptions one bases the simulation on.

 

As a simple model one could use what Cascade used for the PABF final and I used for the Bermuda Bowl: IMPs per board are normal distributed, independent and with constant variance, with a mean equal to the difference between the strength factors of the two teams. I think this would lead to something like a Swiss survivor event.

 

If one believes that there is a random interaction effect related to each pair of teams, this would favor an RR only structure without a KO phase, or a survivor event with slower elimination than in the simple model. OTOH if one believes that matches between strong teams and weak teams are not so informative, either because of higher variance or because some strong teams are good at crunching weak teams and that is not the quality we are looking for, one should strive to get the weaker teams eliminated ASAP.

[hrothgar]

Running a round robin to reduce an 8 team field to 4 doesn't make any sense...

 

I'm almost positive that running a series of short Round Robin matches will significantly degrade the accuracy of the event.  Its much better to allocate two full days to a straight KO.  You'll have more than enough time to add an additional round to the event and also lengthen the number of boards played each round.

 

I'm 99% sure that this can be demonstrated using a Monte Carlo simulation.

i'm sorry but an mc simulation won't "prove" anything. I'm pretty certain i can demonstrate that any (vaguely sane) format i happen to prefer is 'best'; it will depend on the characteristcs of the teams concerned.

Hi Frances...

 

The word "prove" might be a bit strong. Even so, I think that MC simulation is the best way to approach this type of issue.

 

Formal models focus the decision making process.

 

You're quite right when you note that the data that you feed into a model will have a significant impact on results. However, I would much rather have a specific technical discussion about variance in the skill between teams, distributions of board results, and appropriate sensitivity analysis rather than some "warm and fuzzy" talk about my "feelings" about how some event "should" be run.

[cherdano]

Well, you certainly won't prove that the selected format is "wrong", since you can't prove that your goals are correct and other goals (choosing the second best team, giving every team at least one day of play) are incorrect.

[hrothgar]

Well, you certainly won't prove that the selected format is "wrong", since you can't prove that your goals are correct and other goals (choosing the second best team, giving every team at least one day of play) are incorrect.

Here once again, I'd argue that formal modeling is the way to go:

 

You're perfectly correct that a formal model won't determine whether its more valuable to select a second place team or guarantee that every team plays for a full day.

 

However, adopting a formal model forces you to make explict choices of these types of tradeoffs.

[JanM]

I don't have anything to do with designing the format for the Intercollegiate Finals, but I do think that allowing all of the teams to play for at least one day is a very legitimate goal for this event. Of course, one purpose of the event is to choose a champion. But another purpose is to promote bridge, and specifically to promote bridge among college students.

I often hear complaints after the first day of the GNT National Finals from people who have been eliminated and don't like the fact that they "came all this way" to be eliminated after only one day of play. I'm sure that if I hung out more in the Flight B & C areas where teams are eliminated after one session, I'd hear more grumbling. And grumbling is something that the organizers definitely want to avoid in the Intercollegiates (not that organizers don't in general want to avoid grumbling, just that in some events the grumbling is more acceptable because other goals are more important).

In this particular event, I really do believe that it is appropriate that the #1 goal be for the participants to have a good time, not in the sense of being at a party, but in the sense of seeing the activity of participating in a serious bridge competition as something that they enjoy doing and would like to continue doing. We need to do everything possible to see that all of them come back again when it's on their own dime.

This is also an event where the seeding figures to be terrible - most of the players won't have any kind of track record on which to base seeding. That argues against a straight KO. And the short time argues against a double elimination KO (I think). So a combination of Round Robin and KO seems like a good solution to me.

[Guest Jlall]

In this particular event, I really do believe that it is appropriate that the #1 goal be for the participants to have a good time, not in the sense of being at a party,

pfft, don't worry jan thats where I come in :lol: I'll make sure they arent disappointed with a national, haha

[mike777]

edit

[hrothgar]

In this particular event, I really do believe that it is appropriate that the #1 goal be for the participants to have a good time, not in the sense of being at a party, but in the sense of seeing the activity of participating in a serious bridge competition as something that they enjoy doing and would like to continue doing. We need to do everything possible to see that all of them come back again when it's on their own dime.

This is also an event where the seeding figures to be terrible - most of the players won't have any kind of track record on which to base seeding. That argues against a straight KO. And the short time argues against a double elimination KO (I think). So a combination of Round Robin and KO seems like a good solution to me.

In my mind, "Playing in a Serious Bridge Competition" means that the Conditions of Contest are designed in such a way as to maximize the chance that the best team wins.

 

Short matches - like the ones that you have a round robin - are complete crap shoots. A single lucky break on a critical board can have a disproportionate impact on an entire match.

 

Case in point: The GNT trials in District 25 used a Swiss format that was used to seed a 8 team KO. The first day features a series of 7 board Swiss matches before switching over to long KOs. The team that I played on did decently though not spectacularly during the Swiss phase of the event. Our scores were all over the place (As were the scores of all the other teams). In contrast, the KO portion of the event seemed to yield more reasonable results.

 

As I noted earlier, its fairly easy to use statistical models to contrast different event formats. I think that its unfortunately that there is so much resistance to taking these types of considerations into effect.

 

Would it be possible to get a more specific description regarding the conditions of contest that will be used for the actual event?

 

1. How many boards per round will be used during the round robin stage?

2. How many boards will be used during the two round KO on the second day?

[TimG]

Case in point: The GNT trials in District 25 used a Swiss format that was used to seed a 8 team KO. The first day features a series of 7 board Swiss matches before switching over to long KOs. The team that I played on did decently though not spectacularly during the Swiss phase of the event. Our scores were all over the place (As were the scores of all the other teams). In contrast, the KO portion of the event seemed to yield more reasonable results.

The Swiss (or round robin) qualifying should be viewed as a long match against multiple opponents, I believe. Yes, one would expect more variance over 7 board matches than over 28 board matches. But, the same teams that do well in one 28-board matches are going to do well in four 7-board matches. It might not be quite as good a way to directly compare teams A and B, but it's probably not that far off in a reasonably balanced field.

[Guest Jlall]

In my mind, "Playing in a Serious Bridge Competition" means that the Conditions of Contest are designed in such a way as to maximize the chance that the best team wins.

Agree, but here there are conflicting goals and a wide range of skill levels. This is the one and only event for all juniors to play in against other juniors. They even cancelled junior camps here (which is what got me into junior bridge). Really if we want to attract somewhat interested players to bridge I can think of nothing better than getting them to come to a national, play some bridge against other juniors and then go out and have a good time after the game with the other juniors. If this were to really be just a straight seeded knockout with the best teams playing the worst teams to begin with and killing them or w/e that would hurt this goal.

 

Really the solution imo is to have more "junior only events" throughout the year and make this one the one that is designed to pick the best team with other ones being more social/learning/give everyone a chance etc.

 

But for now that doesn't exist and the 2 goals of this event conflict with each other so there's not much of a solution. I think this is a fair compromise. However I'll admit that my position has changed in recent years, and I am already selected automatically for a team. If I was not automatically selected I could see myself getting super pissed over a fairly random format where the best players do not win (in fact this has happened).

[TimG]

In this particular event, I really do believe that it is appropriate that the #1 goal be for the participants to have a good time, not in the sense of being at a party, but in the sense of seeing the activity of participating in a serious bridge competition as something that they enjoy doing and would like to continue doing. We need to do everything possible to see that all of them come back again when it's on their own dime.

If your goal is for them to enjoy participating in a serious bridge competition, you need to offer them a serious bridge competition. I'm not suggesting it has to be theoretically perfect, but it must aim to be a good format from a serious competition standpoint.

[awm]

There are two different events being discussed here, and some people seem to be using them interchangeably. We have:

 

(1) The ACBL Intercollegiate Championships.

 

This event is open to teams of four-to-six each of which represents a university. All team members must be full-time students at the same university (admittedly there have been exceptions to this rule in the past, but there shouldn't be). Team members must also be born in 1982 or after. The early rounds of this competition are played on February 16th on bridgebase; essentially the field is divided into brackets each of which plays a round-robin format of short team matches.

 

The top few teams are offered an expenses-paid trip to summer nationals (this year in Las Vegas) to play for the championship. Usually this is the "top eight" teams but last year it was only the "top four" even though more teams participated than in previous years. This year's CoC say the number of teams selected will depend on the number of entries.

 

While the Intercollegiate Championships do name a "College Champion" their purpose to a great degree is getting young players involved in competitive duplicate. This is currently one of the few major programs in ACBL which directly encourages young people who know how to play bridge to compete in national tournaments. It's reasonable to make it a priority that teams traveling all the way to nationals, often for team members' first major duplicate tournament, get to play for a reasonable amount of time and enjoy themselves. Admittedly it might make sense for the qualifying round to be held over multiple days or involve face-to-face matches between the teams, but the logistics for this appear difficult.

 

(I'm not trying to deter other efforts to get young players involved in bridge! However, ACBL seems to spend a lot of time/money teaching very young kids to play bridge without really trying to get them involved in duplicate. ACBL also spends a fair amount of time/money selecting a national junior team composed of the "future bridge experts" of the country, but these are generally people who play duplicate bridge tournaments regularly anyway. The Collegiate, and perhaps also the new "Youth Nationals" are the only things really encouraging young people who already know how to play bridge to get involved in tournament bridge.)

 

(2) The selection process for the US Junior Team

 

This competition is open to all bridge players meeting the age requirements. There is no requirement that competitors be students or that teams be from the same part of the country. The goal is to select a team to represent the US internationally.

 

The primary goal of these trials should be to select the best team. However, there are a number of considerations that make this different from selecting an open (or women, or senior) national team. First, there is a lot of turnover from year to year as to who meets the age requirements. This means that finding "future talent" and giving them some encouragement is critical -- we can't just send the same team back year after year because they will get too old for the requirements. A KO format which might pick the best team accurately will also send a lot of people home early and make it hard to tell who the "up-and-coming" players are since they might lose to the eventual winners in round one. Second, skill levels among young players change very quickly. The people who were just learning the game two years ago can be among the better players now. And there are not very many "junior" events and most juniors aren't doing much in the open national events -- so "seeding" is likely to be lousy. Third, selection of teams has a big impact. The top open players all pretty much know each other and can be relied upon to try to form strong teams and/or add good pairs to their teams to fill out four to six. The top junior players do not necessarily know each other, since they have often been playing competitively for much less time. Fourth, there is a point that the trials should be "fair" so that all juniors have at least the perception that if they play well, they can make the team. This is true to some sense about open trials as well, but the timespans are much longer -- if the open trials hand a lot of seeding advantage to some folks over others, we can always say "well I have no chance this year, but if I rack up some seeding points by doing well in major events I can maybe make the team in two years or four years or six years." But for the juniors, most people have a narrow window when they are both good enough and young enough to have a shot at the team, and if politics or people's preconceptions about their ability give them no opportunity, there won't be a chance two or four years later to make up for it.

 

In any case, the junior trials would seem best served by having a long competition to select the team, but this is made more difficult by the fact that many people in this age group need to make a living (and those who do make a living as bridge professionals don't make it by playing in junior events). The upshot has been that there's usually a short event which doesn't make anyone completely happy, and that this has recently been combined with simply selecting one of the two teams based on who has competed for the US previously (inserting some of the politics and preconceptions into the process, but at least there are two teams). Of course, the issues here are difficult to resolve since there are so many conflicting goals.

[han]

In my mind, "Playing in a Serious Bridge Competition" means that the Conditions of Contest are designed in such a way as to maximize the chance that the best team wins.

Really? To my mind "Playing in a Serious Bridge Competition" means that the contestors take the event seriously, which is affected in many more ways than just the conditions of contest.

[JanM]

Case in point:  The GNT trials in District 25 used a Swiss format that was used to seed a 8 team KO.  The first day features a series of 7 board Swiss matches before switching over to long KOs.  The team that I played on did decently though not spectacularly during the Swiss phase of the event.  Our scores were all over the place (As were the scores of all the other teams).  In contrast, the KO portion of the event seemed to yield more reasonable results.

The Swiss (or round robin) qualifying should be viewed as a long match against multiple opponents, I believe. Yes, one would expect more variance over 7 board matches than over 28 board matches. But, the same teams that do well in one 28-board matches are going to do well in four 7-board matches. It might not be quite as good a way to directly compare teams A and B, but it's probably not that far off in a reasonably balanced field.

Yes, that's exactly right, and it's particularly true when 50% of the field will advance from the Round Robin. It's when there are relatively short matches and fewer than 50% of the teams advance that Round Robins don't work well.

Although I think that a very good reason for using a Round Robin in the Intercollegiate Finals is that it allows all of the teams to play for a full day and also allows each team to play against each other team, it is also one of several ways to select the best team. IMO, people tend to rant against Round Robins because of experiences with Round Robins that select a small percentage of the field.

BTW, starting with a Round Robin is clearly a better way to select the second best team than is a KO with random seeding (and I really think that any seeding of the Intercollegiate Finals will be random).

As for selecting the team to represent the US in the Patino Cup (the World Championship for teams of players 26 and under) in Beijing, we don't yet know what the format will be. We will be allowed only one team in that event, so we don't need to use a Round Robin to assure that we do a good job of choosing a second team. But if there are an awkward number of teams for a KO, we will probably use a Round Robin at the start of the event to come down to an even number for a KO.

As Adam says, one of the biggest problems with Junior Trials is that there isn't enough time. If a significant number of teams enter, two days just isn't long enough. But if the event is longer than 2 days, we won't get a significant number of teams.

Finally, Adam left out the third event that will take place in Las Vegas: the selection Trials for the FISU bridge championship. That Trials will take place after the other two, and will select two teams. All of the players must be between 18 and 28 years old and must also have been associated with a FISU recognized college or university during the current academic year. Since we will be selecting two teams from that competition, we will definitely want to run a competition that does a good job of selecting both the first place and second place team, so depending on the number of teams entered, we'll either start with a Round Robin or perhaps run a double elimination KO.

[JanM]

Actually, now that I think about it, is US citizenship required for a person to be on a USBF international team?

I agree the US citizen part sounds funny. I wonder, though, if it may be a way of dealing with the idea of foreign students (who are students at American universities, but not considered residents)?

I'm afraid I need to correct my earlier answer to this question. Although to be a USBF member a person need only be a US resident, not necessarily a citizen, and to play in the WBF Junior events representing the US, a person need only be a US resident, the FISU rules do require citizenship. I have no idea why, but of course it's up to FISU what restrictions they want to place on teams. I'm sorry if I misled anyone before.

[olien]

I have found different answers to the exact age requirements for the Schools category. This post says born in 1987 or later and the WBF site says: "a player is eligible for the schools if they have reached no more than their 20th birthday in the year in question." Which is correct?

[skjaeran]

I have found different answers to the exact age requirements for the Schools category. This post says born in 1987 or later and the WBF site says: "a player is eligible for the schools if they have reached no more than their 20th birthday in the year in question." Which is correct?

The last part is correct, except that a player born in 1987 who played in a Zonal Championship last year and qualified, is eligible.

 

Same for juniors. Players eligible are those born in 1983 or later, but also players born in 1982 who qualified last year are eligible.