Selecting USA Team

[jjbrr]

Nige1, what do you mean by "good new pair"? If such a thing exists, they would never go unnoticed in America and thus would certainly have a team for the trials. If they were good enough to actually make a splash in the trials, there is no chance they would simply not play in the trials because of the format.

 

And what does the format have to do with "new participants"? There are lots and lots of other opportunities for a new player to establish his reputation. As so, why would the interests of a new participant be any concern whatsoever to anyone else?

[TimG]

Something very like this format was proposed for the 2009 US Trials, and was overwhelmingly rejected by the (very large and quite representative of the players in the Trials) International Team Trials Committee after a lot of discussion.

It is unsurprising to me that a committee made up of team trials players favor a team trials format.

 

A decade or so ago, District 25 was considering early starting times (10 & 2 or similar) instead of late starting times (1 & 7). A survey was conducted at a regional where all events were run at 1 & 7 and the results showed that players preferred 1 & 7. No one should have been surprised.

 

This is not to say that the ITT Committee got it wrong. I just think that having the committee made up primarily of players who play in the event and may have a financial interest in seeing it run one way rather than another is a bad idea.

 

Tim

[mrdct]

So aside from the fact that mrdct misleadingly compares Olympiad and BB performances, he also seems to disagree with PeterGill about whether the 2009 team was selected by a teams trial or pairs trial.

Addressing your first point, it is somewhat unavoidable to have to compare Olympiad and Bermuda Bowl results given that for at least the last 20 years Australia has used teams trials to select 100% of its Bermuda Bowl teams and has used pairs trials for most, but not all, Olympiad Teams. Pairs trials are also used to select our team for the PABF Championships (East Asia & South Pacific) in non-Bowl years, but I haven't included them in the data as I don't think the field is even remotely comparable (although Australia has failed to win that event for more than 30 years now so I guess it does provide some anecdotal evidence against pairs trials).

 

On your second point, Australia's 2009 Bermuda Bowl team of I Thomson, I Robinson, D Appleton, A De Livera, P Reynolds, R Brightling was defintely selected by way teams trial - results. With no disrespect to any of these players who are all fine bridge players and certainly much better than me, this team went on to finish 18th/22 in the Bermuda Bowl which I believe was Australia's worst performance in the history of that event. This team overcame the favoured team of M Green, P Gill, S Hans, T Nunn, A Peake, B Richman in a 64-board semi-final and then defeated the four-handed team of J Ebery, L Gold, T Antoff, A Simpson by 70 imps over 64-boards in the final.

 

Let me be quite clear - I am not an advocate of pairs trials, but I just don't see the evidence backing up Peter Gill statement, "teams selected by Pairs Trials are much worse than those selected by Teams Trials". What I do believe though is that for the size of its bridge population (32,707 which is greater than all but two European countries - France and Netherlands and I think is currently the 5th largest bridge population in the world) Australia has significantly and consistently under-performed at top-level bridge. So either we aren't very bright down here, we aren't developing our top players properly and/or we don't have our selection methods sorted out properly.

[mike777]

It seems in Aust. your selection methods are just fine. What is the problem? IN fact you mention Aust. has the fifth largest dues paying Bridge population. Aust. is doing something right! The number one priority is not to win but to let everyone compete in a somewhat level playing field. I have no issue with giving seeding points.

 

If that means Mr and Ms nonexpert make up the team to represent my country...great!

[awm]

Selecting a good team is part of the goal here. People like to see their country win, and there may be benefits to having world champions in your country too. I'd say the goals of selection should be:

 

(1) Select the best (or nearly-best) possible team.

(2) If there are many players of top quality (i.e. good enough to be on the team), make sure that all of them (or at least many of them) get the chance to represent the country at some point.

(3) Create at least the impression that the team is selected in a fair way.

 

The first goal should be pretty clear. There are several reasons for the second goal. One issue is that players get older, and if the same team has been sent for the last decade or two there may suddenly be a shortage of international experience if a player dies or retires from bridge. Another is that it allows for "mixing things up" if a particular team hasn't been successful recently. It also leads into the third goal -- people are more likely to support a national team in various ways if they feel that the selection process is fair. It also averts blame being placed on the selection method or committee if the team doesn't succeed.

 

The key to which is better (teams or pairs trial) depends on what we believe about the various things. For example, suppose there are three pairs that are much better than the others. Do we believe that these pairs will end up on the same team for the team trials (my impression is very likely they would not)? Do we believe that these three pairs would normally make up the best team (this is less clear, and probably depends on how well they get along)? And how realistic is this idea that there's a small number of pairs much better than the others anyway?

 

My impression is that in the USA, there are a fairly large number of pairs (more than six pairs anyway) which are of roughly equivalent level. Assuming that there's not substantial friction between teammates (some of these people are hard to get along with) pretty much any team composed of three of these good pairs will have a very good shot at winning a world championship. However, what happens in practice is that it's quite rare for a single team to have three of these pairs (because of sponsorship constraints). What frequently happens is that there are one or two "sponsor pairs" who are top quality (i.e. Nickell-Freeman). These top sponsors hire two other top pairs, and usually win the trials because they have three top pairs whereas other teams (with a weaker sponsor) have only two. In principle a team of three top non-sponsor pairs could form and contend for the event, but this only rarely happens (financial reasons). So the upshot is that the team trials often becomes "selection by the few wealthy sponsors who can actually play the cards well." This means the same teams often represent the US year after year (obviously they are good teams; certainly they are better than any other team with a sponsor that we could put together). But this has all the downsides mentioned by failing at goals 2 and 3 above. The problem is reduced a little by having two teams instead of one, but we do still see a lot of the same faces. Again, if these players are clearly head and shoulders above everyone else, it would be unavoidable to some degree... but it's not clear this is really what's going on.