Just thinking out loud

[cherdanno]

"The differences between the players at the top level are getting smaller and smaller. Thus, to win an event like the Vanderbilt, it matters more and more to have a very good sponsor, and teams without a sponsor have a good chance of winning even if they have no top pair."

 

Agree? Disagree?

[Hanoi5]

JLall will disagree.

[Jlall]

Having a good client is easily the difference between a great team and a good team. There is not THAT much difference between the great pairs, but there is a huge difference between how well the client plays. A bad client might drop 40 more imps than a good client on average per match, that is just huge.

 

As far as non pro teams doing well, the top 19 seeds in the spingold were all pro teams, so I guess the point is that the non pros are not nearly as good as the pros at that point. If you want to be on a really good team you have to be either a pro or a client, just the nature of bridge right now.

 

Teams like Welland basically play as a non client team (in the sense that Welland is as good or better than many/most pros). They also have higher quality pros than a true non pro team because of the money involved.

[nigel_k]

>The differences between the players at the top level are getting smaller and smaller.

 

I doubt this but have no strong opinion either way. There has been some shuffling of partnerships recently which puts the players involved at a disadvantage until they can re-establish a tested combination. Then a gap will start to open up again.

 

>Thus, to win an event like the Vanderbilt, it matters more and more to have a very good sponsor

 

I don't understand how this follows from the first statement. Doesn't a big difference in ability at the top level mean two of the very best pairs can carry a sponsor more easily?

 

>teams without a sponsor have a good chance of winning even if they have no top pair.

 

A sponsor who plays well like Nickell and has the very best pairs on his team will always be hard to beat. In most cases a sponsor is a major handicap though. Assuming you define 'top pair' so that most of them are playing with sponsors, the above statement is probably true.

[awm]

As far as non pro teams doing well, the top 19 seeds in the spingold were all pro teams...

It's important to remember that the seeding points are based on a number of factors which tend to favor pro teams. Primary among these is performance in recent Spingold/Vanderbilt/Reisinger. Obviously any good team has the potential to do well, but non-professional players may not play in all three events every single year. So even making the (rather substantial) assumption of equal skill level, the professional players are likely to rack up more seeding points. A secondary factor in seeding is masterpoints, which clearly favor the professionals (who likely play twenty-plus regionals and three nationals each and every year) over strong players who are not full-time at bridge.

 

This is not to say that the "non-professional" teams are necessarily close to the level of the professional teams. For the most part, playing so many tournaments per year also means the professionals are more experienced and likely better players. And at least at the top levels, there should be some relationship between being hired to play on a professional team and being a good player. But I don't think "seeding points" really prove anything.

 

Certainly it has been quite some time since a non-professional team won the Spingold.

[xcurt]

As far as non pro teams doing well, the top 19 seeds in the spingold were all pro teams, so I guess the point is that the non pros are not nearly as good as the pros at that point. If you want to be on a really good team you have to be either a pro or a client, just the nature of bridge right now.

I posted some stats on winning margins in the other thread.

 

In rough terms the top 20 teams in the Spingold were about 0.5 IMPs per board better than their opponents. This is approximate because there were a few top seeds out from Day 1 and Day 2.

 

That's 8 IMPs per segment, or roughly one swing -- a little more than a partscore swing, a little less than a game swing -- per segment.

 

I think that's largely, but probably not completely a function of the fact that the full-time professionals play bridge all the time, and bridge is probably like most every other competitive endeavor where erosion of skill happens very quickly with inactivity.

[Finch]

As far as non pro teams doing well, the top 19 seeds in the spingold were all pro teams, so I guess the point is that the non pros are not nearly as good as the pros at that point.

I'm not sure the conclusion follows from the premise.

 

The Spingold attracts a lot of top international players. They are generally being paid to be there by clients. It doesn't seem too far a stretch to suggest that if there were top amateur teams around outside the US, they are less likely to be there is no-one is paying for them.

 

I think also that there is a huge difference between countries. The US has by far the biggest pro bridge population. It might well be the case that all the top players are professional.

 

By contrast, in England (which I realise is not really directly comparable) the first division of the premier league has 8 teams, only two of which have a playing sponsor. Of the last 10 teams to win the Gold Cup, four non-professional teams have won, and three sponsored teams have won twice each.

[Jlall]

As far as non pro teams doing well, the top 19 seeds in the spingold were all pro teams, so I guess the point is that the non pros are not nearly as good as the pros at that point.

I'm not sure the conclusion follows from the premise.

 

The Spingold attracts a lot of top international players. They are generally being paid to be there by clients. It doesn't seem too far a stretch to suggest that if there were top amateur teams around outside the US, they are less likely to be there is no-one is paying for them.

 

I think also that there is a huge difference between countries. The US has by far the biggest pro bridge population. It might well be the case that all the top players are professional.

Huh? That was my point. If you are a top player you will very likely get a client, and unless you are very wealthy you are not going to turn that down. If you are an amateur who is not getting paid, you are probably not a top player (or you are independently wealthy).

 

I find it funny that people seem to think the good foreign players are UNDER seeded also. If you are a foreign player who gets hired to play here you are generally given more seeding points than you are worth, just based on ZOMG HE IS A TOP FOREIGN GUY. You then have time to put up results, and your points will decay if you don't.

 

Drijver and Brink don't have that many seeding points because they have put up no results at all at ACBL nationals in the few years they've been playing. They definitely started with more seeding points than they have now. I am not saying this to say anything bad about them, they are a great pair, just saying this because someone mentioned them as an outlier.

 

In general your seeding will be more accurate after you have played for a few years here than whatever you get when you first come over (you will be overseeded).

 

Anyways to be clear my point about the top teams all having clients was to say that top players will inevitably get hired. There will never just be 4 dudes who are really good, good enough to win the spingold, who are going to play amateur and win.

 

Obviously if 4 truly top players made a team and had no client they would have a big advantage. The point is this will not happen.

[Aberlour10]

There will never just be 4 dudes who are really good, good enough to win the spingold, who are going to play amateur and win.

 

Obviously if 4 truly top players made a team and had no client they would have a big advantage. The point is this will not happen.

It happens from time to time, f. ex last year Vanderbilt winners Jassem-Martens, Gierulski-Skrzypczak played 4-handed without "classic" sponsor(ship), so far I know only with donation for travel and accommodation by The Polish Bridge Union, as the current polish national team in training.

 

Robert

[Hanoi5]

Obviously if 4 truly top players made a team and had no client they would have a big advantage. The point is this will not happen.

 

So, no more ACES?

[awm]

There are a lot of logistical issues with non-professional teams.

 

To be a really top-flight player, you need to play a lot of bridge against top-flight competition. This is difficult to do if you're not playing professionally (or independently wealthy) because it simply takes a huge amount of time.

 

But even if we assume that there exist some amateurs who are "close enough" to top-flight that they have a serious chance to win the Spingold (taking advantage of the professional teams having to carry a sponsor), it may be difficult to actually field such a team. People who aren't full-time bridge professionals sometimes have jobs that prevent them from taking a week to play in the bridge nationals. Money may be an issue (bridge nationals are expensive). Despite it not being their primary source of income, some may want to take a pro date in some lesser event or on a weaker team rather than play on an amateur team in the big event (keep in mind that even a really good team probably only has a 5% or so chance to win the Spingold). And since amateurs often play for fun, they may prefer to play with friends who are potentially weaker players rather than on a team of the "best amateurs" some of whom they may not know or particularly like. Even supposing that there's a team of six amateurs who would have a decent chance and are willing to play together, if each person on the team has a 80% chance of making it to any particular nationals, how often do they actually get to play as a team? Only about a quarter of the time.

 

The key to the Aces (and to the recent Polish winners of the Vanderbilt) is finding a non-playing sponsor. This was more possible in the past, when bridge was sufficiently popular and top teams sufficiently well-known that there could be significant advertising/publicity advantages from sponsoring a top team. These days it still happens occasionally (Lavazza team for example, and China seems ripe for some of this sort of sponsorship) but it's no longer a likely situation in the US.

[Stephen Tu]

Anyways to be clear my point about the top teams all having clients was to say that top players will inevitably get hired. There will never just be 4 dudes who are really good, good enough to win the spingold, who are going to play amateur and win.

 

Obviously if 4 truly top players made a team and had no client they would have a big advantage. The point is this will not happen.

 

So you give Boyd-Robinson/Woolsey-Stewart/Doub-Wildavsky (aka USA I 2009) absolutely 0% chance of winning a Spingold/Vanderbilt? Certainly it'd pretty rare for a non-sponsored team to win, but I think it's possible.

[mike777]

I would think a non sponsored team could still be called a pro team.