The Continuous Pairs Tourney

[rigour6]

I apologize in advance if this posting is out-of-date.

 

Many moons ago, we mooted the idea of a "Continuous Pairs Tourney", a sort of director-less (or director optional) tournament that never ends.

 

As you know, when you play in the Main Bridge Club now, you can see some results for comparison and you'll get your $, but your opponents don't change. The idea of CPT was that you'd enter the tourney, play 2 or 3 boards, then there would be a Swiss style-movement. You could leave whenever you'd played as many hands as you felt like, the players themselves (via the software) would do the subs.

 

Why would players enter such an event?

 

1. It demands as much or as little time as you like/have.

 

2. There's variety and more interaction. Instead of playing the same pair and hoping your levels work out Ok, you play three boards then on to the next.

 

3. Because it's a Swiss, you eventually end up playing at your level. E.g. your ongoing percentage is based on your score for the last, say 5 rounds, with all rounds you haven't played being weighted at 50%. So you enter in the middle, and say you play a 60% round. Now your score rises to 52% and you are seeded accordingly. At the end of 5 full rounds, your score is based entirely on how you did.

 

4. Your goal for those who are competitive is to see how low a table a number you can reach. You have a good round, you go up, but you also know, 5 rounds from now, this good round is dropping out of my average, will I hold my position then? And the lower the table you reach, of course, the tougher the opponents. It's like an ongoing game of "King of the Hill".

 

 

 

Whatever happened to this idea? Was it ruled undesirable, was the programming too onerous, or is it simply that other things have taken priority?

[TylerE]

Swiss Pairs is a really really bad idea. It really doesn't reflect true skill. If you put, say, Meckwell and another ultra-strong pair (Fantunes, say) at the same table, because of the quality of play involved, 'worse' MP results would probably come back than randoms playing, due to the proper defense being found almost all of the time.

[rigour6]

For Round 1, yes. But then both pairs would end up playing a different pair for Round 2, and my guess is they'd start moving up pretty quickly after that. Then they meet again at the top, and etc.

[Dealing_Don]

This seems like an excellent Idea. It would also answer concerns expressed in another area of the forum dealing with formed partner rooms.

 

How nice it would be to set a time to log in with your partner knowing that you could immediately join a tourney, play and be scored immediately, not have to deal with players coming anId going and be able to leave when you wanted/needed to.

 

The only drawback I forsee is the waiting time between rounds, but if the tournament were large enough and the movement flexible, you should be able to pair up finished tables with finished tables to minimize wait time.

 

Siince it's a continuous tourney, it really wouldn't matter if you played the same pair later as eventually that would have to happen if you both played long enough.

 

I think most players are here to play bridge in a competitive environment with minimum hassle. I can see how this might just be the ticket to deliver the need.

[uday]

So if pairs are jumping in and out, and rounds are (say) 1 board long, how would you score the T ? Just as a series of board scores?

[BillHiggin]

So if pairs are jumping in and out, and rounds are (say) 1 board long, how would you score the T ? Just as a series of board scores?

Perhaps the word "tournament" is misleading. I would think of this as a "pairs rating club". Pairs are competing for standings which are equivalent in some manner to a pair rating (at least it is not individual rating) and the concept of final standing just does not exist (after all, there is no ending). In fact, the use of something similar to elo rating for the results might make sense (so comparisons with stronger tables are more significant than with weaker tables).

[Echognome]

I could see something like this working.

 

Maybe you could have:

 

Continuous MP Pairs

Continuous IMP Pairs

Continuous BAM Pairs

Continuous Swiss Pairs

 

Continuous Cross IMP Teams

Continuous BAM Teams

Continuous Swiss Teams

 

Something like that. You wouldn't need to implement all the ideas at once, but try out one of them and see how it goes.

 

So how I imagine it could run is that you have fixed time length rounds. There is no director and no adjustments. In that sense, it's like the main room. However, there are some advantages to having a fixed length round. If someone stalls at least the round rolls over. Note I could see some people use stalling tactics and that would suck, but I really don't have a good way to control for that.

 

Have one board rounds. This just makes a whole lot of sense. That way, if someone leaves, then you are really only stuck one round. If someone in a pair (or team) disconnects, then the whole pair (or team) will be out the next round. The good news is that they can hop back in the next round if they return. So basically, at the start of each round, all those that are on the waiting list who've registered join in along with all the pairs (teams) that are still in the tourney. Maybe as a convenience, you can have a "I want to leave after this round" button that either player can push (and maybe a pop-up window to confirm?). That would encourage people not to leave after the next round has started.

 

The good part about it is that you can have (in theory) as many comparisons as there are people playing each round. The scoring is done round by round so it should just be treated as a separate scoring category entirely.

[hrothgar]

When I originally proposed the continuous floating pairs idea I wasn't envision a tournament.

 

My entire idea was to provide an environment for social play in which folks could (easily) drop in or drop out. No permanent partnerships. Everyone gets rehuffled every board (maybe every two boards)

 

I saw two primary benefits to this type of system

 

1. It would provide a convenient mechanism by which players could find a place to play for however long they wanted. If you want to play for 10 minutes great. if you want to play for ten hours great,

 

2. Equally significant, by providing this service for casual players it would (hopefully) improve the quality of the Main Bridge Club. You no longer have quite as many problems with folks dropping in for as board or two and then leaving again.

[BillHiggin]

The ugly side of any attempt at rating is the bad behaviour it inspires.

A minority will seek to satisfy their ego and not let the purity of good bridge interfere with that. They will "graze" (sit but leave when they do not like the hand or the opponents), "bail" (leave or stop or just slow down when it is clear the result will be unfavorable) and outright cheat (send in a swill pair to IM them the facts).

 

It does not take many of these to ruin things for those who just want the honest challenge.

[Dealing_Don]

I would not see the "tournament" scored overall as much as just giving the pair their scores for the boards they play. Maybe one could see a "current ranking". Also, there could be a posting of the day's "tournement" results where pairs who have played a minimum number of boards are ranked in order of percentage (if MPs) or IMPS (if imps). In concept, the scoring would not be much different from that which a pair receives in the main bridge club. The differences I see are:

 

1) Scores are never reset

2) Pairs are automatically moved and so that a pair always has compettion

3) The boards are only played by the tournament, so they have their own boards rather than sharing them in a pool with other players in the main bridge club.