[Walddk]

It's no coincidence that the Americans did much better in the individual. The advantage of being from the same country where they have a general concept of 2/1 (which the players chose for this event) was significant.

On the European team, however, we had 6 pairs from 6 different nations, and in real life they don't play the same system. Some play 2/1, some strong club, others Acol and a few modified Standard.

Now that they were forced to play one particular, natural system ("Standardish American"), they had many more misunderstandings than the Americans, and that was no surprise to me. With respect to the indy, Europe would have been better off if they had many pairs from the same country.

With this said, I think it's fair to add that the Americans also judged better than the Europeans towards the end where USA had a clean sweep (12-0) in consecutive rounds.

Curiously, this happened in a round despite the fact that Europe won board 1 (of 6) at all tables when the two Europeans bid 7NT vs. 7♠. From then on the Americans never looked back.

Roland

[Gerben42]

Not just misunderstandings in the bidding but I suppose the number of times two US pairs play against eachother is an order of magnitude more than two European pairs from different countries. This means they will know more about their style than the European team.

Also although some US pairs don't play "Standard" with their regular partner, they have played many more boards using this standard system and more boards where their opponents used this system than their European counterparts.

Finally something about the scoring. Make it more balanced! 33% Pairs, 33% Teams and 33% Individual! The amount of points available in the Indi was too much compared to the other two disciplines (not that this would make a difference for the final result). With this scoring I had the feeling that two parts (Pairs and Teams) were just played for the gallery and then everything was decided in the Indi. To me, this sounds like the flawed scoring similar to many quiz shows.

[hrothgar]

Personally, I had a lot of fun watching the event. I got to see some high quality bridge, which is the important part. (BTW, any chance that BBO could provide us with Vugraph stats? It would be interesting to know how many people were watching)

If I were running the show, there are a couple things that I might consider doing differently. Its unclear to me whether the forced parallelism to the Ryder Cup is a necessary component of the event... There is probably some overlap between bridge players and golfers. I see nothing wrong with promoting the event as the Ryder Cup of Bridge. It might even make sense to schedule the event at approximately the same time. However, the scoring system seems un-necessarily complex. I don't follow golf at all. Would I be correct in assuming that there was some deliberate effort to mirror the scoring system used in the Ryder Cup. If so, is this really necessary? I can't imagine that anyone has that great an emotional attachment to it...

Another change that might be worth considering would be allowing the "locals" to participate in the team selection process. I don't think that these types of popularity contests would necessary strengthen the teams, but it might help folks to identity emotionally with the teams. If your main goal is to boost the number of viewers...

[winkle]

hrothgar, on Sep 22 2006, 07:47 AM, said:

However, the scoring system seems un-necessarily complex.

I thought the exact opposite - that they did a great job making the scoring system simple to someone who doesn't normally follow bridge. Each board is worth a point. Each match consists of some number of boards, and winner of each match gets some number of buffet points (depending on the type of match). No need to explain imps or VPs.

I'd agree that the explanation on the web site is unnecessarily complex.