Las Wages-

[pigpenz]

was wonderin after the article Las Wages by Larry Cohen in The Bridge World about how 33 of the teams were paid and 20 of them were using foreign progessionals as to what extent The ACBL has been fueled by fake economy that has been recently exposed and to what extent it will have on future tournaments and events.

 

To me I find it hard to justify tournament expenses anymore with triple digit room rates etc and travel expenses. The economy will have to have a triple down effect somewhere on the line to tournaments.

 

Maybe in some way it could possibly be good in that it could eventually lead to sanctioned online tournaments( lets no go bashing about cheating!)

[TimG]

I wonder what is preventing there from being more organized online events.

 

I know that cheating is a factor, but really there is plenty of potential for undetected cheating in face-to-face games. I don't want to get into trying to prove it, but I imagine most of us could devise a simple cheating technique that we could get away with in face-to-face events; there is a certain amount of required trust in order to believe in the integrity of face-to-face events. I do not understand why this trust does not translate to online events. One factor, I'm sure, is that when we go to a local sectional or regional, we know most of the people we are playing against. Online, there are some people with blank profiles and even if they did provide their name, it would be much more likely that we didn't know a good number of them. The online game is much less personal.

 

Still, I am surprised that there are not more online leagues or clubs with regular games.

 

As far as the economy prompting more online games, I would expect that those making decision to forgo some bridge in favor of online events would first cut out minor events like sectionals and regionals before NABCs.

[Al_U_Card]

The ideal solution would be distributed tourney like the Epson etc. That way, they can have an NABC at 50+ locations (one in each state or more) and you can play while you stay at home.

 

Granted you won't get to see the big names...but that is not the major draw...or is it?

[pigpenz]

The ideal solution would be distributed tourney like the Epson etc. That way, they can have an NABC at 50+ locations (one in each state or more) and you can play while you stay at home.

 

Granted you won't get to see the big names...but that is not the major draw...or is it?

sorry I guess my post was misinterpreted a bit...but was looking at bridge from the point of view on how the bad economy was going to have an effect on bridge. Since for live tourney bridge there was a micro economy built on people showing up for tournaments. So is table counts go down will that drive tourneys to look more at the possiblity of going online was just one side thought

[awm]

I suspect that a lot of the "bridge economy" is based on fairly wealthy retirees, and that while their investments might take a hit from the economic downturn, they are not facing the loss of jobs or corporate pensions. In fact there has been a bit of deflation recently, so their other expenses may be going down (look at the gas prices!) and hotel costs may be soon to follow.

 

Looking at the hotel situation, while the "ACBL rate" is often close to $200/night, there are often fairly cheap hotels quite close to the playing site. Relatively few people take advantage of this, because most bridge players are quite well off (and some also have limited mobility).

 

On the other hand, raising the entry fees at nationals in this economy after two consecutive years when ACBL made money seems like a slap in the face to the membership.

 

In any case I don't expect that big of an impact from the economic situation.