[hotShot]

In bridge as in other areas of competition, you will get as good as you need to win or as good as your personal abilities allow you to get.

Juniors don't have the experience they would need to win an open event, but some do get there very fast.

Mind sports do have some physical fitness aspects. Top chess players loose 2-3 kg of weight during a top level game. So why should there be no seniors event?

I guess 90+% play bridge for social pleasure and the number of players capable to top level competition is probably lover than 2%. My impression is that men are more interested in competition than women. The open event is usually much bigger than the ladies event. The quality of the top player is usually better if the pool to pick from is bigger.

To win an open event you need 4 (very) good player, so the best women often join a mens team to play there.

[mycroft]

In the ACBL, we have 18 teams in the Prestige Women's KO Event, the Wagar. Now, very few of them are slouches, and almost none enter it for the experience. I'm sure that even with the proliferation of 0-1500 and 0-5000 events, there are several teams in the Spingold, Reisinger, and Vanderbilt "for the experience" - my team went in knowing that if we won two matches, we would have to default as one of our team members had a booking already made for Wednesday. Of course, what she said was that if we made it to Wednesday, her partner probably would understand a cancellation...

So, why is this not the case in the Wagar? Why are there so few teams, and why in particular are there so few "nohope" teams? Well the answer to the first question, I would say, is that it's not considered a premiere event - so given the choice between playing in Wagar or in the Spingold, people play in the Spingold - unless they have a chance to win, or place highly in the Wagar.

So why do the players that do, play in the Wagar? Well, apart from the NABC+ win for GLM (and frankly with 16 high-class teams out of 18, it's not really "easy" compared to, say, the NABC Swiss Teams), I can only think of one reason: seeding points for USWBC trials.

First, if you don't play as 4 of your team, you don't get seeding points at all. Second, if you have two ineligible players (i.e. men, but also non-Americans), you're getting 50% of the seeding points you earn. Third, while winning the Wagar is an accomplishment (see above), it's still probably easier to win than to go third in the Spingold (same seeding points); and it's almost certainly easier to go third in the Wagar (for 40 points) than it is to get to the round of 16 in the Spingold (for 32 points).

So, the only people in the Wagar, with a small number of exceptions, are there to be USA I or II in the World Championship Women's game.

Now there are problems with this:
- for one thing, a "NABC+ championship", especially one already not considered first-class, with only 18 competitors, is considered lower-class than it otherwise would be (and probably, lower-class than it actually is).
- Second, because it is so strongly in the competitors' best interests to play in all-women teams in women's events, there is limited opportunity to learn by playing outside those events. If there is a difference between women's bridge and the men, at least some of it comes from the artificial divide that separates the two - in that case it's no different from the difference between American high-level bridge and Polish (more so, really, as about a third of Polish Division one now play in the ACBL top events).
- Third, of course, is the restriction pointed out before, that you have to make a choice - are you going to try to win the Venice Cup, or are you going to try to make the BB team? At a slightly lower level (and in countries other than the USA), are you going to try to make the VC team, or play "dead money" in the BB qualifier, and hopefully learn enough to make it another year?

There may be a "nature" difference between men and women - and I do think Sabine Auken makes a good point in general. There may be a "nurture" difference between men and women. There certainly is a Bridge society difference.

But a large part of it, at least in the USA, is the Positioning Points chart for the USWBC.

Please note that I don't believe that any of the decisions made in that chart are wrong - maybe a little aggressive (like I can't seed as a single or pair, 4-women teams that augment with a male pair are considered to be worth only as much as that male pair), but it's clear that they're concerned about bringing in ringers (also seen with the "player with significantly less experience" modifications), and so are making that strategy actually disadvantageous to the attempters. And given Jan Martel's discussion about holding a second trial, I don't see that we're going to get away from the ACBL qualifying tournaments being held in parallel, so women will still have to make the choice to play for VC or BB. So I certainly can't fix it.

Michael.

[han]

In a different thread I questioned whether Auken/Von Arnim are top. I didn't mean to suggest that I think they are not, I really don't know. It would be wonderful if they would play in the Bermuda Bowl instead, or in the Spingold. They'd be the pair I'd most want to watch.

It is very unfortunate that they were not able to compete for the German team this time, hopefully they will be in the near future (by which I don't mean that I hope that Germany won't make it to the top 10 in the EC). In the meantime I hope they will find rich sponsors who want to play in the open ACBL events with them.

[mrdct]

helene_t, on Oct 9 2007, 04:28 AM, said:

mrdct, on Oct 8 2007, 11:09 PM, said:

What about a one-table "pirate" broadcast of a Bermuda Bowl semi-final by an operator not actually at the table (or in the country for that matter) who could watch the broadcast of one of the other providers on one screen and key the action into a BBO vugraph prsentation on another screen.  Would just need a way to get the dup file for the session to that operator shortly after the match starts.

Yes, we just set up a server on the Caiman Islands. The financial stuff is taken care of by a Gibraltar bank. The details are discussed on an encrypted forum not affiliated with Fred, Uday or any other person with a real-life identity. You know where to find us.

That's pretty much how it went.

[Walddk]

Our matches Thursday Oct 11 in Shanghai are as follows:

Finals, Segment 1:
8 pm Wednesday Los Angeles, 11 pm Wednesday New York, 05.00 Thursday Paris, 4 am Thursday London, 1 pm Thursday Sydney

USA1 v Norway (BB), Germany v USA1 (VC), Indonesia v USA2 (SB)

...

Finals, Segment 2:
11:20 pm Wednesday Los Angeles, 2:20 am New York, 8.20 Paris, 7:20 am London, 4:20 pm Sydney

USA1 v Norway (BB), Germany v USA1 (VC), Indonesia v USA2 (SB)

...

Finals, Segment 3:
To be decided.

....

Why not just write finals of all three series you may ask. Because we may get a couple of sessions from the play-offs.

Venice Cup and Senior Bowl: 6 segments of 16 boards (Thursday and Friday). Bermuda Bowl: 8 segments of 16 boards (Saturday included).

Roland