[MickyB]

mycroft, on May 1 2008, 03:36 PM, said:

Silly non EBU question - why the holes in the seeding? I was trying to figure out why there were any triangles at all with 64 teams, then I figured out there weren't 64 teams...

Is it just "seed the top 32, take the rest and enough blank slips to make 32 and slam them on the board and see how they fall?"

Yup, the idea is that 1v32, 2v31, 3v30 etc play each other on Saturday morning, having each played against a randomly determined non-seed the previous evening. Where there are gaps, the three teams play a triangle over 64 boards.

[jchiu]

If I recall correctly, Jones and Rosen were part of the defending Liggins team from last year. Among the favorites, the committee still doesn't see that Wolfarth manages to pull something out of his briefcase every year. I'll be rooting for them and the mostly Dutch five-seed.

[han]

Good luck to Frances, Paul, Mike, Ant, Ed and other forum posters that are playing (any others?). Hope to see some of you on BBO Vugraph!

[david_c]

mycroft, on May 1 2008, 04:36 PM, said:

Is it just "seed the top 32, take the rest and enough blank slips to make 32 and slam them on the board and see how they fall?"

Not quite - you only add the blanks after you've drawn numbers 33 to 48. (Because the format wouldn't work if numbers 33 and 64 were both blanks, for example.)

[paulg]

Jlall, on May 1 2008, 08:08 PM, said:

How many clients hire teams for this event? I see a couple in the top seeds but I don't know much about english bridge so just curious.

I think that there are about 12, but Frances/gnasher/mike probably have a more definitive count.

p

[MickyB]

cardsharp, on May 1 2008, 08:27 PM, said:

Jlall, on May 1 2008, 08:08 PM, said:

How many clients hire teams for this event? I see a couple in the top seeds but I don't know much about english bridge so just curious.

I think that there are about 12, but Frances/gnasher/mike probably have a more definitive count.

p

That looks about right, of which about 7 or 8 are in the top 9 seeds. The majority have hired teams, I think, but a couple have just hired partners, and one team looks to have two clients on it.

[FrancesHinden]

Jlall, on May 1 2008, 09:08 PM, said:

How many clients hire teams for this event? I see a couple in the top seeds but I don't know much about english bridge so just curious.

My count is 7 of the top 9 seeds, one other team and two teams with one professional player but it's quite possible I've missed some.

[gnasher]

Outside the top 9, there are at least 6 teams where someone is playing professionally.

The prevalence of clients, especially amongst the top seeds, is a fairly new phenomenon. 15 years ago a pro team there would have been no more than two or three clients in the entire event.

[helene_t]

Must be a good thing. Gives more good players the opportunity to play full-time or at least semi-prof.

[FrancesHinden]

Jlall, on May 2 2008, 11:52 AM, said:

gnasher, on May 2 2008, 05:07 AM, said:

Outside the top 9, there are at least 6 teams where someone is playing professionally.

The prevalence of clients, especially amongst the top seeds, is a fairly new phenomenon.  15 years ago a pro team there would have been no more than two or three clients in the entire event.

Do you think this is a good trend or a bad trend or indifferent?

The S4s have more pro/client teams than most other events. If you are importing good foreign players to play with you, it obviously makes more sense to do it for a concentrated 4/5-day event as you get more boards per plane fare. So the long KO events such as Crockfords tend to have fewer professional teams (at most 3 teams in this year's 8-team final have a client on them, and it might be only 2).

Personally for this event I think it's a good thing because it gives me the chance to play against people such as Grotheim, Tundal, Brogeland (to pick a country at random(!)) that wouldn't otherwise be playing in England. That's fun. It probably makes us less likely to win, but then when we do win, we'll have beaten better players.

The only downside is when the sponsor is a very weak player (and I won't start naming names here) you do end up playing a very different game - the team can be doing well, you get to play them after a few matches and find that one of your opponents would usually be getting about 50% at a club duplicate. I'm getting more practice playing against pro/client pairs and tactics are certainly different.

For selecting the best English team to play in international championships I am less convinced, but that is a whole different debate (and I can see pros and cons).

[gnasher]

I regard it as a necessary evil.

I want bridge professionals to be able to make a decent living. If they can't, some of them will choose to do a proper job instead, have less time to spend on becoming better bridge players, and be less good opponents when I play against them. I'd prefer it if we had sponsors who were willing to subsidise our top players without playing themselves, but as there seem to be few such altruists about I can't think of any better alternative to the current situation.

There used to be a bit of a stigma attached to professionalism in English bridge, which probably explains its slower takeoff in this country than in the USA.

[david_c]

The semi-finals and final are on vugraph tomorrow, and I see Frances' team are in the final four.

[gnasher]

For the semi-finals the one undefeated team chooses its opponents from the three once-defeated teams. They chose Frances's team of strong amateurs rather than either of the pro-client teams. I think I'd have chosen Gillis.

[FrancesHinden]

Thanks for the thoughts, but sadly we were insufficient by 2 imps.
(Although as the undefeated team they had the right to an extra 8 boards had we been up after 32.)

edit: hands will follow later when I am less tired

[FrancesHinden]

p.s. Mickyb's team won the consolation event, the Punchbowl.