Real Experts?

[MFA]

I would rate expertise by measuring the average nr. of errors per board. In 20 boards, for instance,

 

<1 error: master (worthy of national team)

1: expert

2-3: adv

4-6: int

7+: newbie

Hmm, how about me then :) ?

 

I make around 30 mistakes / 20 boards, what is my ranking :unsure:?

7+: newbie :)

 

Not sure why we select you to represent Denmark :D

 

Roland

Don't know why either, Roland.

 

But seriously, IMO is bridge a game of oodles of mistakes.

[slothy]

This issue seems to be one that crops up over and over again...seems it will never sleep. At the expense of mixing my metaphors to the point that not even i can extract any meaning from the melée....

 

There will always be some people who are convinced that others shouldn't be given the privilege to over-rank themselves (e.g. self-assessment) as it gives other people a distorted idea of the level of players they are playing against : even though they leave the table 10 boards later (or 1 in some extreme cases :0 ), realising that the person opposite wasn't the level he had (self-)assessed himself to be....

 

There will always be some people who are convinced that all players should be given the privilege to rank themselves as/so they continue to believe that they are at the level they have (self-)assessed themselves to be, even though people opposite (too often for it to be random occurrence) leave the table 10 boards later (or 1 in some extreme cases :0 ) and believe that they left because the person opposite hadn't stayed long enough to recognise the true haloed genius in front of him.

[helene_t]

I don't think anyone is disputing other people's right to calling themselves "experts", anymore than other people's right to calling themselves Nobel laureates, concert pianists or kama sutra specialists :unsure:

 

Thinking about it, I don't really know what, if anything, we're discussing.

[Finch]

Thinking about it, I don't really know what, if anything, we're discussing.

I'm discussing whether to play in the national swiss teams in January at the moment.

[slothy]

I don't think anyone is disputing other people's right to calling themselves "experts", anymore than other people's right to calling themselves Nobel laureates, concert pianists or kama sutra specialists :unsure:

 

Thinking about it, I don't really know what, if anything, we're discussing.

lol

[slothy]

Thinking about it, I don't really know what, if anything, we're discussing.

I'm discussing whether to play in the national swiss teams in January at the moment.

I am discussing with my colleague which one of us has to go back down to the kitchen to put sugar in my coffee since she went to make me one and brought it up sugarless :unsure:

[slothy]

Damn hussy,

 

she wins all these arguments :unsure:

[PassedOut]

But seriously, IMO is bridge a game of oodles of mistakes.

Absolutely (and embarrassingly) true. A player who makes only 7 errors in 20 boards will do very well indeed.

[sceptic]

ok lets take a guess how many people play bridge in the world

 

100,000,000 ?

 

how can you fit all these into 5 or 6 catorgorys

 

You are wasting your time trying to evaluate self ranking or even ranking by events won or any other way

 

The one thing I dislike about this repeated discussion is the attitude that we have any right to judge people, someone who plays this game and is what you may deem to be an under achiever in life, takes up bridge and enjoys it and collects points and gets to a rank that makes that person proud to have achieved, now we have experts that pour scorn on the rank (i.e. ACBL life master).

 

ACBL life master, they have earned that right to be called that, the issue is some do it quicker than others, some do it by persistance, some do it by ability

 

Just worry about your own rating and stop worrying about what everyone else has got, you know if you are any good and you know if your opps are crap, if you don't like your ops or pards, markem down and avoid them, it is easy on BBO

[blackshoe]

Well, obviously, if she neglected to put sugar in your coffee, it's your fault. :) You probably forgot to remind her. :unsure:

[slothy]

Damn hussy,

 

she wins all these arguments :unsure:

 

Her name by the way is Najia. She is of British Asian heritage and she is looking for a bloke she can bicker with and make his life a misery ( please come forward someone, i am sick of being a substitute [at least on weekdays and during office hours] until someone fills the above mentioned niche in her life)

 

if you are (quote) 'intelligent, sensitive, rich, funny, give-no-*****, like/love (my [said with inflexion]) kids (ie to paraphrase : dont selfishly think you gonna be using my body to have your own [ed.]) ' .... you meet one quarter of her criteria

 

You can only have sex on bank holidays and birthdays

 

Her motto is 'till dawn do us part'

 

Alex

 

applications in writing to my office :)

[blackshoe]

I take it she doesn't read these forums. Either that, or you're suicidal. :unsure:

[finally17]

You are wasting your time trying to evaluate self ranking or even ranking by events won or any other way

 

Just worry about your own rating and stop worrying about what everyone else has got, you know if you are any good and you know if your opps are crap, if you don't like your ops or pards, markem down and avoid them, it is easy on BBO

It's not unreasonable to want to play with someone who can keep up with you. A semi-accurate rating system (self or results-based*) would allow that.

 

It's also not unreasonable to be annoyed with self-proclaimed experts. I'm not close to an expert, but I am better than a significant number of people that call themselves that on BBO. This not only annoys me for obvious reasons, it is also needlessly intimidating to people who are not good enough to realize that the self-rated expert is often no expert at all.

 

Maybe intimidation is their goal. Who knows?

 

Or maybe the definition of the word really has shifted so that much. In which case, I call for a new term. Suggestions anyone?

[Codo]

I am happily married, else.... <_<

 

I fit the describtion (at least the part I could translate) and of course I am World Class in Bridge too. :rolleyes:

 

Funnily enough no one else shares this view. All blind and deaf I guess.

[pclayton]

But what is 'enjoying success' supposed to mean?

I am pretty sure Fred means "won national events". I agree with you that it's somewhat easier to win a national event in Tibet than in the UK.

 

Roland

Competing in an NABC event over here feels more like a World Championship. In the Blue Ribbons in SF, it seemed like 1/3 of the pairs were non-US. It seems the weak dollar makes it real easy for the international pairs to compete here.

[whereagles]

It seems the weak dollar makes it real easy for the international pairs to compete here.

but just for competition's sake. if you do get a money prize, you better rush to trade it for oil barrels :rolleyes:

[slothy]

I am happily married, else....  :rolleyes:

 

 

 

From what i gather, she ain't partial....

 

N.B. no she doesn't read these forums <_<

[sceptic]

Her name by the way is Najia. She is of British Asian heritage and she is looking for a bloke she can bicker with and make his life a misery ( please come forward someone, i am sick of being a substitute [at least on weekdays and during office hours] until someone fills the above mentioned niche in her life)

 

 

I am sure I married this womans mother

[mikeh]

I would rate expertise by measuring the average nr. of errors per board. In 20 boards, for instance,

 

<1 error: master (worthy of national team)

1: expert

2-3: adv

4-6: int

7+: newbie

I assume you are joking :huh:

 

One of the problems with this type of analysis is that most players don't know that they have made a mistake.

 

In fact, one of the hallmarks of the improving player is that he will feel he has regressed when all that has happened is that he is now seeing mistakes previously undetected, but seeing them after making them, not before. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

 

There are a host of mistakes that will pass unobserved by a less-than-expert player. And I am morally certain that the few error-free sessions I have ever thought I played were in truth flawed in ways too subtle for me to detect.

 

MY own observations suggest that the average player with (in NA terms) say 300-500 mps makes an average of 2-3 mistakes per board!

 

Bear in mind that a mistake does not carry with it any automatic penalty. Indeed, all good players have frequently experienced losing imps or getting a bad board from a technically correct bid or play, missed by the opps or the field. Bad bridge can actually lead to success, which explains a lot about the game: why it is difficult to improve, why so many players don't see mistakes they've made, and why the game is so challenging... if every mistake cost, most of us would have quit a long time ago.

[whereagles]

One of the problems with this type of analysis is that most players don't know that they have made a mistake.

I'm taking clear errors that had, or could have had, concrete consequences. I'm also referring to those errors in an abstract way. Whether or not people notice them is irrelevant.

 

Obviously, the table can vary (say add 2 errors per category), but I wasn't joking. Why should I be joking on this subject and context?

[Tomi2]

100,000,000 ?

 

how can you fit all these into 5 or 6 catorgorys

[/b]This overrating starts with star players in BBO. Somehow players from my country Germany recieved a star for winning one major national championship but this only qualifies them as "Expert"

 

if you take this 100 000 000 and try fo find a fair method to split them into 5 groups, then 2 ideas come into my mind at once:

 

every group is as bis as the other:

that means there should be 20 000 000 WC, 20 000 000 Exp etc.

 

this seems not logical but 1/5 of the players beeing expert is close to BBO standard. (now 8000 are online and 1600 are expert!)

 

 

the other way is to take 100 000 000 ^( 1/5) (thats nearly 40) and say:

There should be 40 players all over the world who should call themselves "worldclass"

There should be 40*40=1600 Players worldwide who should call themselves as "Expert"

64000 advanced

~2 500 000 intermediate

rest something like beginner

 

this would mean, that ALL WC and Expertplayers in the world are currently online

 

even a rating between "wolrdclass" players woulbe usefull:

There are 65 World Grand Masters alive (according the www.wbfmasterpinots.org), about 50 of them seem to be still active players, 15 did not imporve their rating in major international championchips in the past 10 yeras

some examples of this first group in BBO are alle the well known Italians, Americans etc. you see in the top list.

One of the 15 players who does not score that much anymore ist B.Garozzo

 

then there is a group of players, who often have good results in international competitions but do not qualify as WGM, they are called "Life Master" or "International Master", some BBO users as example:

Fred Gitelman :huh: or Larry Cohen (both WGM) or

his partner Bred Moss (WIM), T.Sadek- W- El-Ahmady (both WIM)

 

a 3rd group of BBO stars are players who once had inernational success or, as the definition says, have represented their country in a world championship.

That fits to many "junior" stars, every year there is a World Championship for juniors/schools, I participated in two of them already (so even I should have a BBO Star), next year will be my third, then there are events for women and seniors - same here- and there are many players who represented their country (say Australia or any other country where its not as difficult to qualify for the team as in USA, Italy etc.) in 1982.

 

so my idea for the ratingsystem would be to give 2 additional stars to players from the first group and one for group 2 members (Fulvio2002 would have *** rating then) and for all others:

 

maybe the BBO software could make it possible to rate your partner and oponents after each match / tournament. So everybody who would be interested in a reting system could first "selfrate" him self and all his partners and oponents could chose 3 options:

"I think his rating is too low - he seens better than he rates him self"

"I think his rating is ok"

"I think he is overrated"

or somehing like "score this player on a scale between 0 and 10"

and then the scores are multiplicated with the #of boards you played against/with him and an average score is taken.

 

in your porifle you would see your rating and what others think about this

[han]

Expert

Under my definition, it's quite easy: you are an expert if you have won a national competition. Now, depending on your country you will be more or less good (it's a bit easy to win national competitions in, say, Rwanda than it is in the US). It's also easier to win women's competitions than open ones (at least, it is if you are female), but the definition is clear.

 

World Class

Again, under my definition you are world class only if you have played for your country in the Bermuda Bowl, Venice Cup or World Juniors. Not much margin for error there. I'd probably admit people who have played in the Olympiad as well (even though this will include some pretty weak players globally speaking).

While your suggested rules are very clear, I think they are also very poor. A true rating should reflect how good players are.

[awm]

Well it's hard to get unambiguous ratings that make sense across countries. I'd go with something like:

 

Beginner -- Learned to play in the last year, unlikely to score above average in the local (open) club game.

 

Intermediate -- Can hold their own in local club games, often finishing around average but rarely winning.

 

Advanced -- Regular winner in local club games, almost never finish below average. Can hold their own in local tournaments, usually around the middle of the field. May have some tournament wins in local open events.

 

Expert -- Regular winner in local tournaments, rarely below average. Can hold their own in national tournaments, usually around middle of the field. May have a few national wins if playing for a long time or in a country with a small bridge-playing population. Would not be someone you'd pick to win in a major event like a European Championships or NABC, but would probably land around average in such a field.

 

World Class -- Regular contender in major events such as European Championships or NABCs. If playing for a long time and/or in a country with a small bridge playing population, or if eligible for restricted events (women, seniors, juniors) then will have multiple national wins and have represented country internationally. Will be a virtual lock to finish near the top of the field in any event entered.

[jdonn]

I would rate expertise by measuring the average nr. of errors per board. In 20 boards, for instance,

 

<1 error: master (worthy of national team)

1: expert

2-3: adv

4-6: int

7+: newbie

I think most newbies probably make about 5-6 noticeable mistakes per HAND. Most experts, probably 4 or 5 in 20 boards, on a close detailed analysis by a group of other experts.

[Stephen Tu]

Adam,

 

I like your proposed definitions a lot better than the current BBO ones. I've always felt like the current ones were rather vague, and especially left too little distinction between "expert" & "world class", since to me the people who "have success in national tournaments", at least in the U.S., are the same usual suspects who I would consider "world class".