USA Team Trials-2013

[jogs]

 

The discussion was, if Bridge / Chess sport is a lucrative bussiness, and my comment was, that the pool of money available to

pure Chess players is limited.

To make a decent living, you have to do additional things besides just playing tournaments.

 

Top chess players have opportunities to make money in endeavors due to his chess notoriety. For the most part bridge players do not.

[jjbrr]

Then you miss the point. When Culbertson was around, he drew more kibitzers than any poker match does.

^{[citation needed]}

 

"The numbers for Live-minus-30 coverage of the WSOP on ESPN are in. About a half million viewers on ESPN 2, 23 million minutes of click-friendly eyeball time on ESPN 3, and a “cute” little 646,00 viewers for two hours during prime time on ESPN 1."

 

Zel, it's 2013. Culbertson died nearly 60 years ago, and bridge is much less a household hobby now. Just because you say that bridge is just as entertaining or marketable as chess or poker does not make it so, especially now.

 

 

What all three of these games have in common is that the general public only watch them for the personalities involved. Others watch them because they can play the game and are interested in watching good players. So the "watchability" of all of them is defined by the personalities of the top competitors and the general popularity. But if you were to take those factors away, none of them is any more interesting to watch per se.

 

Close but still wrong! Poker is popular because it's watchable in a completely mindless format while hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars can swing on any given hand, even one seemingly mundane. Poker on TV is also great because the producers can edit the content into a pretty exciting 30-minute broadcast with very little lull in the action by cutting out what I assume is hundreds of hours of mind-numbingly boring folding. The exciting stuff in poker is a tiny percentage of the game, but it can still be pretty exciting even if the casual fan only understands bet, raise, fold as the only actions in any given situation.

 

I would argue even chess is viable on TV for what gwnn said. Experts can analyze and post mortem positions for hours, explaining variations, discussing pawn structure and the value of connected rooks and strong diagonals and win equity etc etc. It might not be the most appealing entertainment, but it can be engaging to the right audience. It's certainly not exciting and it's difficult to really get passionate about, but it would certainly be informative and full of content.

 

Contrast this with bridge where you have to be a pretty serious fan AND you have to follow the whole play of the hand to really grasp what's going on. On top of that, the analysis is often pretty anemic. "Well he has to guess the queen of clubs now. He'll probably tank for 8 minutes before he makes the play. He knows xyz about the hand, so he should get it right. The guy at the other table also got it right, so it'll be another push." Yeah, not watching that.

 

As far as personalities go, I guess you're right that watching the cast of Jersey Shore play a high stakes money bridge match would be some amazing TV, but I assume that's not what you meant. Was Ely Culbertson or some other expert a great TV personality when bridge was popular? Well, that has nothing to do with bridge being good for television and everything to do with Culbertson being good for television.

 

And for the record, personality isn't really as important in poker as I think you make it out to be. Yeah, it helps the ratings that they have some interesting heroes and villains, but even online poker games are well railed when the players are often anonymous and the railers can't see the hands. Watching so much money change hands so fluidly is interesting; it's really that simple.

 

 

What sets poker aside is that the competitors have somewhat more freedom to show their personalities - but to my mind the interest in the hands themselves is less. What sets chess apart is that it is pure, a game of complete information, and therefore can be seen as a pure battle of minds, wills and theory. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for chess games to be repeated 100% to a quick draw, which is not so interesting. What sets bridge apart is the language of bidding, the ability to communicate a hand of 13 cards in great (but not perfect) detail through a "secret code". This code needs to be understandable by the viewers, which leads to two possibilties - either you keep systems simple enough that they can be followed or you ask the competitors to provide details of their methods. Neither of these is done at present, although the prevalence of 2/1 helps. My view is that the second approach (allow more complexity but force the compeitors to provide details publicly) is the right one. No doubt those who want to make systems simpler would disagree, as well as those who have spent years developing their complex systems. Whatever - what matters is that neither poker nor chess is so different at the core of the game itself, only in the accessibility; and that is something that can be changed.

 

This is why I assume you're trolling, but it's so many words I guess you're serious. Poker, chess, and bridge are COMPLETELY different at the core of the games themselves. To steal a phrase from jdonn, comparing the three games isn't even apples to oranges, it's like apples to tubas.

 

Of course the interest in poker hands themselves is less. The hands themselves are almost entirely meaningless. Poker is enjoyable for an audience even if you never see the hands! You could play poker with dice or a deck of Uno cards or colorfully painted rocks and it would still be viable for television.

 

You're right about chess, at least, except the part about "quick draws repeated 100%". ^{[citation needed]} again.

 

Your conclusion seems to be that all three are watchable despite your own concession that bridge needs to change before it's watchable and in the face of evidence that poker is and has been successful for television for nearly a decade.

[barmar]

I don't think the "watchability" has anything to do with the inherent nature of the games. It has to do with whether the general public is familiar with the game. 50 years ago bridge was a popular card game among much of the middle and upper classes of society, and I suspect also reasonably well known by the working class. Bridge champions were household names, and Omar Sharif was almost as well known as a bridge player as a film actor. And there were a few TV shows about bridge.

 

For various cultural reasons, I think mostly because of changes in family lifestyles and media like TV and Internet, children no longer learn bridge routinely from their parents as they did in previous generations. They're still likely to learn chess, either from parents or in school, and poker has managed never to fall out of the public consciousness. Poker can be learned in minutes -- if we simplified bridge enough to make this possible, I don't think it would be nearly as interesting to the rest of us. You'd get a game comparable to Hearts or Spades -- I used to play them, but now they seem as much fun as Go Fish.

[GreenMan]

Anyone who says Culbertson proved it can be done: We've had a similarly outsize personality in Zia in the game for decades, and we are where we are. When the Blue Team toured the U.S. in the '70s they drew some enthusiasts but nothing you would call cheering throngs of spectators. And so on. Bridge drew a lot of attention when it was new and developing, but now it's matured, and it's less interesting to the casual observer. No getting around that.

[Wwchang]

Poker is inherently easy to watch. The player has a very limited number of options at each stage, and the cameras showing the hole cards add to the drama. Chess is virtually unwatchable in a meaningful way, except to experts. Most of the likely spectators are not going to be appreciate why Radjabov's positional "blunder" changed his evaluation from +0.21 to - 0.35 and see the continuation that will lead, 20 moves later to a lost endgame. More likely, they will just count pieces and think he's still up because he has one more pawn in material. At the Super-GM level, one move blunders are very, very rare. So the best that 99%, probably 99.9%,of the audience will really be able to do is to watch the engine evaluations. That is somewhat interesting, but hardly compelling. Even Maurice Ashleys "exciting" commentary doesn't change that. Blitz is even worse to watch, from a substantive point of view. But a 7-hour classical game is also not compelling.

 

Bridge is in between, but much closer to poker - anyone who knows the rules and is an intermediate level player and is watching double dummy can see and understand when a play is about to fail. They can also usually appreciate a difficult play in a way that they are not able to grasp why Kg6 is the only drawing move but Kg7 leads to a loss. (They won't appreciate a defensive return that breaks up a squeeze, but overall I think it's much more comprehensible to amateurs than chess is.)

 

As far as compensation, I read an article at some point that indicated earnings probably drops to about $200k if that for the 10th ranked player in the world. Pretty sure it drops very rapidly beyond that. The big money is in the WC matches; super tournaments pay reasonable appearance fees and prize money, but they all invite the same (generally top 10 players plus a few locals), and everyone else struggles to do well in open Swiss events that they themselves pay to attend, and for which prize money is not that lucrative.

[Cyberyeti]

Well to get back to the earlier discussion, looks like they picked Levin/Weinstein as the third pair for the BB. http://bridgewinners.com/article/view/team-kranyak-usa-1-adds/

[JLOGIC]

great choice of pairs

[chasetb]

Probably the best pick. Two great players, who have been a great partnership for numerous years, you can't go wrong. As mentioned on BW, Bobby Levin is the oldest player on the team. Only 40 years ago, he was the youngest ACBL Life Master ever. How times change!

[billw55]

I guess that means there is no conflict with their obligations to team Nickell.