100, 300, 500, 700!

[Hanoi5]

I read an article recently about one of the reasons why the previous scoring for going down doubled in non-vulnerable contracts was adopted. It involved the late Edgar Kaplan. Is it true? Why isn't it changed back? Which is better?

[Gerben42]

I guess it's to stop too much preempting. If 4 down doubled NV is only 700 and even down 5 is only 900, at favourable you can take preempting to levels that is unconfortable for most.

 

Also you can save against vulnerable slams with very few tricks: 7 down NV would be less than a vuln. small slam, and 11 down NV would be less than a vuln. grand slam.

[Walddk]

Gerben's interpretation is correct.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_scoring

 

Scroll down to Recent scoring changes (at the bottom).

[blackshoe]

Interesting that things that happened more than twenty years ago are considered "recent" in this game. NOt to mention that things that occur every ten years or so are considered "too frequent".

[ArtK78]

I have a funny story relating to the old scoring.

 

Many years ago, I won my first sectional pairs tournament. On one hand, my partner, who had a very short attention span, forgot that our opponents were playing Precision. When I employed our conventional method of interference over their strong club, he took my bid as natural, and he would not stop bidding until the opponents doubled. The contract went down 4 nonvul for -700.

 

We scored 4 matchpoints out of 12 on the board, as four pairs scored up 720 in 3NT making 7.

 

We won the event by 1 1/2 matchpoints.

 

I am sure that when word of this atrocity made it to the authorities, the first thing on the agenda was to change the scoring system.

[barmar]

The old scoring system also sometimes made it profitable to save over 7NT at favorable vulnerability. Bid 8 of your longest suit and all you have to do is take 3 tricks, scoring -2100 vs -2220.

 

They've since made bids at the 8 level illegal, but even without doing that they're practically never going to be profitable with the new scoring.

[Mbodell]

The old scoring system also sometimes made it profitable to save over 7NT at favorable vulnerability. Bid 8 of your longest suit and all you have to do is take 3 tricks, scoring -2100 vs -2220.

 

They've since made bids at the 8 level illegal, but even without doing that they're practically never going to be profitable with the new scoring.

Just this week in our unit team game we had one where the opponents were cold for 7♠ V and we were cold for 4♥ NV. -800 is much better than -2210. Unfortunately we were -2210 versus +710 as our teammates were in 5♠+2.

 

At their table the hand with the long hearts preempts immediately to 4♥ and teammates disagreed on who had shown what strength and stopped in the 5♠ (in fairness they were 12 HCP opposite 12 HCP and under pressure).

 

At our table the hand with the long hearts decided to let the opponents find the right level and then take the sac. The opponents decided the right level was 6♠ (after the S hand with the void used KC and knew they were missing 1 KC) but then over the 7♥ sac they decided to bid 7♠. Lose 17. If we could bid 8♥ would have only been lose 3.

 

[hv=d=w&v=n&n=sakq654h94dj832cq&w=sjhq875dqt97c8763&e=s873hakjt632dk5c4&s=st92hda64cakjt952]399|300|Scoring: IMP[/hv]

 

We narrowly lost that 6 board match.

[JLOL]

I heard they changed it because Meckstroth was so frequently saving over vul grands with JTxxx and out lol.

[pigpenz]

I heard they changed it because Meckstroth was so frequently saving over vul grands with JTxxx and out lol.

that was probably part of it since it was pretty easy to save some points that way, they also used to score team games by total points but it was a double grandslam swing that did away with total points

[1eyedjack]

I don't know that I was ever entirely convinced by the argument for the scoring change. If upping the penalty for the sacrifice reduces the incentive to sacrifice, it also reduced the incentive to go for the phantom. Going for 700 or 900 may seem attractive (or safe) contrasted with 800 or 1100 - until you discover that they weren't making their contract anyway.