[geller]

Since the US has the greatest depth of talented players it makes the Bermuda Bowl more exciting for the rest of the world and gives them a better chance to win if the US doesn't send its strongest possible two teams. :-)

[JanM]

mike777, on Sep 6 2007, 06:13 PM, said:

As I said I just wish the goal of the USBC, the number one goal, was not choosing the "best team" or team most likely to win the WC.

OK, I'll bite - why? We're selecting the teams that will represent the US in the Bermuda Bowl. Why would we want a team that wasn't the most likely to have a chance to win the Bermuda Bowl to represent us?

[mike777]

JanM, on Sep 6 2007, 07:43 PM, said:

mike777, on Sep 6 2007, 06:13 PM, said:

As I said I just wish the goal of the USBC, the number one goal, was not choosing the "best team" or team most likely to win the WC.

OK, I'll bite - why? We're selecting the teams that will represent the US in the Bermuda Bowl. Why would we want a team that wasn't the most likely to have a chance to win the Bermuda Bowl to represent us?

I tried carefully to choose my words I hope.

I have nothing against "wanting" that. Make it an important goal.

Just do not make it the most important goal. In this case making it the most important goal, bared having a second trial because the Best players did not want it. What the Best players wanted...took highest priority, if I understood the bylaws and your previous posts.
If you had said the overall membership thinks having only one trial to choose two teams is best.....that would be fine with me. I would disagree but really that would be just fine.

Having a second trial would have allowed more the option to participate. Perhaps more in this case might have meant, more lesser players than best players but I think that is a good/great thing, not a bad thing.

In other years, as I mentioned I think the USBC does a great job in the trial process. If people want to tinker with it, fine.

[geller]

Quote

OK, I'll bite - why? We're selecting the teams that will represent the US in the Bermuda Bowl. Why would we want a team that wasn't the most likely to have a chance to win the Bermuda Bowl to represent us?

The USA basketball team recently won the FIBA western hemisphere championship, thereby qualifying for the Olympics. Let's examine how this was done.

USA Basketball selected the head coach, "Coach K" (Mike Krzyzewski of Duke University). Coach K and the staff of USA Basketball selected a panel of about 40 players (the top NBA pros) and then held a training camp to narrow the squad down to 12 players. They then trained together for two years now (before intl events) and this finally paid off. No one seriously suggests that the USA national team should be any single team (LA LAkers or Miami Heat). The solution is to pick the best players from all teams. This is also how national soccer teams (e.g. for the World Cup) are picked.

Of course bridge is a partnership game so the coach might be tasked with selecting 3 pairs, not 6 players. But the present system, in which teams of six, almost all containing a weak player as a sponsor, compete as teams in the trials, is obviously not the best way to pick the strongest national team. As long as bridge is an amateur sport, and there is no professional coach or general manager tasked with picking the best team (and subject to firing if they lose) the best team will never get selected by the USA. As I said upthread, that's good news for all the other countries.

[mike777]

I think using the comparision of the Olympics, winning is the highest priority is an excellent example. For decades this was not the highest priority and I think more people cared.

Reading the countless debates in British and Ausi bridge over how to select the best team to win just seems to show how far this has gone. So much for the bill paying membership playing and trying to win in some form of a trial.

[JanM]

mike777, on Sep 6 2007, 08:33 PM, said:

JanM, on Sep 6 2007, 07:43 PM, said:

mike777, on Sep 6 2007, 06:13 PM, said:

As I said I just wish the goal of the USBC, the number one goal, was not choosing the "best team" or team most likely to win the WC.

OK, I'll bite - why? We're selecting the teams that will represent the US in the Bermuda Bowl. Why would we want a team that wasn't the most likely to have a chance to win the Bermuda Bowl to represent us?

I tried carefully to choose my words I hope.

I have nothing against "wanting" that. Make it an important goal.

Just do not make it the most important goal. In this case making it the most important goal, bared having a second trial because the Best players did not want it. What the Best players wanted...took highest priority, if I understood the bylaws and your previous posts.
If you had said the overall membership thinks having only one trial to choose two teams is best.....that would be fine with me. I would disagree but really that would be just fine.

Having a second trial would have allowed more the option to participate. Perhaps more in this case might have meant, more lesser players than best players but I think that is a good/great thing, not a bad thing.

In other years, as I mentioned I think the USBC does a great job in the trial process. If people want to tinker with it, fine.

I guess I didn't communicate well then. First, I do think that our primary goal is and should be to select the best possible US teams for international competition. I am confident that a very large majority of USBF members agree with that.

Second, of course what our members want is important. But you have to recognize that our members *are* "the best" players in the US (at least most of them). The USBF has under 300 members and most of them are members because they are interested in participating in International events. So if I implied that we cared about the opinion of "the best" teams, I didn't mean it as restrictively as you think.

Although I don't have any direct evidence of whether our members would favor having two Trials in a year in which we select two Bermuda Bowl teams, I do have some indirect evidence. We just polled all of the people who played in a USBC in 2006 or 2007 to ask what they thought of not holding a USBC in the Rosenblum year. I can't report on the results of that poll yet, because the USBF Board has to act on it still, but I can report that there were people who believed we shouldn't hold one USBC every year. I didn't ask whether we should ever hold *two* USBCs in a year, but I feel confident from the comments that were made in the discussion of whether to hold *one* every year that there would not have been substantial (if any) support for that.

We haven't considered holding two Trials in one year for many reasons: Not very many people have time to participate in two USBCs in a year (I know that from the comments about participating in one). The result would not be to select our two best teams, and that *is* our goal. Putting on the USBC is a very substantial undertaking, that takes many many volunteer hours, and we're stretched far to thin to consider holding two in a year.

Finally, I'm a huge believer in letting anyone who wants to play in our Trials do so. But I'm definitely not a believer in holding a competition that will select a team to represent the US that doesn't have a reasonable chance to win the World Championship.

Jan, once again speaking only for myself, not as a representative of the USBF

[awm]

There are a lot of bridge events where virtually anyone can enter and potentially win if they play well for a few days and get a bit lucky. It's obviously good for bridge to have major events like this, where people can get the experience of playing against top players, where the league can make some money, and where pairs who might be "under the radar" have a chance to win and make a name for themselves. But the US has a lot of prestigious such events, such as the Blue Ribbon Pairs, the Reisinger, the National Swiss Teams, etc.

I think it's reasonable that the purpose of US team trials (at least in the Open) should be to select the best team to represent the US internationally. Yes, it's great to have an event where someone can "get lucky" and stumble into a big upset win... but I'd prefer that they get their prize when this happens and that prize not necessarily involve embarrassing the country in the Bermuda Bowl.

Where I find the policies a bit more questionable is the junior teams, noting that there are virtually no major junior events with open entries, and that the selection process for the national junior team is often much more subjective than the process for the open team (essentially people are simply chosen based on the opinions of members of prior junior teams). In addition, at the junior level there is a lot more change from year to year (players are improving more rapidly, other players are becoming too old to qualify) making the subjective process of picking the best players substantially less accurate than it would be for an open team.

[barmar]

georgeac, on Sep 6 2007, 04:13 PM, said:

What about events like the Super Bowl or the NBA finals? Those have the best teams and some of the mediocre teams in a playoff system( a knockout). If the best team loses first round, well then I guess they were not the best team then. This sounds to me like you are trying to protect the "best teams" which to me does not seem fair at all. They should have to prove they are the best team. If they lose to a lower seed team, then they obviously are not the best team. The best team should always win regardless of the competition.

Even the best can have a bad day -- "best" doesn't mean "perfect". And an average team can get lucky.

Isn't this why many sports use a "best of 5" or "best of 7" format for their championship events (e.g. the US baseball playoffs and World Series)?

[SoTired]

In a professional sporting event, the object is to select the best team at that time. But not the truly-absolutely-if-God-were-judging best team. The Super Bowl determines the NFL Champion. But it is just one 3.5 hour game. A lucky play, an inopportune slip on the grass, a bad officials call and the game could go either way. But that is OK. We get the excitement and chose a winner all in one day. The losers are not executed. We chose the best team with a reasonable method. The method is good, but not definitive.

For the same reasons, I really hate these ridiculously long 128 board matches. I think matches should be based on 26-board segments rather than 32 boards. I also think that a single day, 52-board match should determine the winner.

No more grueling matches where stamina counts above all else. It will make International events shorter and cheaper to run. Maybe allowing them to be run on a yearly basis. It will give us a chance to have more international champions.

It will also put a little more lucky streak chances in the matches. It has to be better for the game of bridge if the "World Champion" title is more widely spread around the world instead of concentrated among a few countries.

Bridge has no clue about marketing.

[skjaeran]

barmar, on Sep 7 2007, 05:32 PM, said:

georgeac, on Sep 6 2007, 04:13 PM, said:

What about events like the Super Bowl or the NBA finals? Those have the best teams and some of the mediocre teams in a playoff system( a knockout). If the best team loses first round, well then I guess they were not the best team then. This sounds to me like you are trying to protect the "best teams" which to me does not seem fair at all. They should have to prove they are the best team. If they lose to a lower seed team, then they obviously are not the best team. The best team should always win regardless of the competition.

Even the best can have a bad day -- "best" doesn't mean "perfect". And an average team can get lucky.

Isn't this why many sports use a "best of 5" or "best of 7" format for their championship events (e.g. the US baseball playoffs and World Series)?

That's the same reason why the USBC KO-matches (in the latter stages) are 90 boards too, not 32/48/64 or whatever lower number of boards you can see elsewhere.