The Long Match

[xcurt]

Also, doubling partscores when up a ton is clearly dumb unless you think your side might have a game, but doing things like making normal aggressive overcalls, or bidding slams when you think they rate to be good, or whatever, should all still happen as it is likely that the opponents are doing the same things. You can lose a lot of imps by not overcalling as well. Recently ish's team was down 70 and picked up 69 in the final 16 boards of their trials. One of the opposing pairs was clearly trying to be risk averse to the point of not making normal overcalls in order to not go for numbers, and they kept losing game swings for doing so. Taking bridge actions that you view as correct is almost always correct, except in areas that have a very small upside most of the time, and a huge downside some of the time, such as doubling a partscore, you would want to be a little more cautious. Of course, I would still say that it was just a bad bridge decision overall to be making a limit raise adn then ripping a partscore with AQT of clubs as part of your values, and that is why your team suffered.

 

I thought that was too loose too (IMO so was the -1100 hand). If that's your style you might say "stick with your style," which is true. On the other hand, the winning case for bidding without values -- blasting the opponents out of games -- isn't as likely to come off when the opponents are stuck so much they can no longer win the match by being right when being right means win 5 or so -- they opponents will just bid game because they need to be right at the game level to pick up enough IMPs to win the match.

[Mbodell]

(Q1: How you would you run it?)

 

Play more sessions and longer matches! Fix the CoC.

 

All matches in our district (21 - we are more geographically compact than many districts, but the event was in the center of the district and there were teams for whom that was a 3 hour drive to reach) for Open and A are 64 boards and are played over 2 different weekends (so 8 sessions, with each match 2 32-board sessions). The GNT B is 28 board matches, and played over as many sessions as needed to be a fair event (currently 5 sessions, so one weekend to play down to the finals and then the finals at a TBA time convenient to both teams). The GNT C is stuck with only a weekend, and is 28 board matches, but is currently less than 16 teams. The GNT are also set up so they mostly don't overlap (only GNT Open and C overlapped at all this year), so people can play in multiple levels if they wish. We had 15 teams in Open, 17 teams in A, 19 teams in B, and 11 teams in C. In the past some sessions of some events (particularly finals or semi-finals) are played at local sectionals, but this year they were all played at a centrally located bridge club.

 

In the B we started on Saturday with 2 heads up matches and 5 3-way with 2 survives (the seeding process in the B-flight is decent, but still highly debatable, so the top 2 seeds getting a 28 board headsup match to start is a dubious advantage IMO, especially when the 19 seed this year was probably one of the top 6 teams in ability). Then we had 12 teams so did 4 3-way with 2 survive. That left 8 teams for Sunday, all remaining matches heads up and end Sunday with 2 teams left.

 

In yours I would have done the obvious 2 heads up matches and 2 3-ways with 2 survive. Then with 6 teams left 2 3-ways with 2 survive. And then then final 4 teams play heads up matches for the semis and then finals. That leads to 4 matches, and I'd expect them to be equal length (so 64 boards). If the restrictions are so broken that you can only have 2 days and the finals need to be 64-boards so you need to eliminate 8 teams on Saturday and can only do it with 3-way and heads up matches, then I guess what you describe is best. If you can't get a full second weekend, and stick to 32 board intro matches what about playing a first round Friday night [to cut from 10 to 6]? If there weren't the 3-way and heads-up restriction and I was limited to just normal Saturday and Sunday and needed Sunday to be the 64-board final I'd do a RR on Saturday where each session each team plays the other team 4 times (so 2 36 board sessions). I'd do it that way so that each match (8-boards) is split between the sessions so it is harder to tell if you are in it or not. I'd also use seeding in the first session, and current standings after the first session in the second session, to try and have the top seeds/winning teams play each other at the end of each session, and have the top seeds/winning teams play the bottom seeds/losing teams early in the session. And hope that by doing that I'd have minimized the dumping chances.

[Cthulhu D]

If they have the better team, then that means the other team has the worse team and should sit client vs client, right? In that case, in one of the 2 sets in the first half, the clients will play each other, which almost always happens. This can lead to the landslide type results Phil was talking about. The top seed doesn't get to pick who sits where every segment.

 

Yeah good point, the obvious game theory implication has no occurred to me! :oops: