[Phil]

Today in my club game I have never ever seen a lower winning score.

Two pairs tied for 1st with an 87 on a 84 top. Thats 51.79%. The low score in the section was 46%.

I would think this might set some kind of record.

[Fluffy]

how many pairs?

[Phil]

8 table Mitchell.

[barmar]

That's certainly unusual, especially for such a small game. Usually small games result in bigger score ranges, because fewer comparisons allows randomness to produce bigger swings.

Our club is a similar size, and we almost always have scores ranging from the 30's to the mid or upper 60's. But it helps to have a few novices randomizing things, giving away big gifts in one round, fixing good opponents in the next.

[jdonn]

I have seen the opposite, 3 out of 8 pairs above 60% and the other 5 pairs below 45%. I have also seen 1/8 at 75% and the other 7/8 below average. Yours is pretty unusual though.

[mtvesuvius]

This was the lowest I have ever seen... Sadly, I was not there that day...

The Lowest Winning Score I Have Ever Seen

The lowest percentage game I have even seen was 19% in NYC at the NABC... Luckily it was not me

[Echognome]

That's lower than anything I can remember seeing. Perhaps the best indicator is the highest last place score. 46% seems pretty high on that measure as well.

[david_c]

I think I remember someone writing in to the EBU magazine to say that they had scored a game in which all the pairs ended up with 50%. You can't beat that!

[Echognome]

david_c, on Feb 19 2009, 09:28 AM, said:

I think I remember someone writing in to the EBU magazine to say that they had scored a game in which all the pairs ended up with 50%. You can't beat that!

Must have been socialists!

I always joked when I lived in Sweden that when you play Swedish poker at the end of the night, everyone puts their chips in the middle and divides them up equally.

I guess on could make an objective measure of dispersion all variance or maybe a Gini coefficient... Nah. That's going overboard.

[MarkDean]

Perhaps slightly off topic, but this weekend at a stratified pairs at a regional, I saw a pair win master points for first in the section in C with 37.xx%.

I do not think I have ever seen a winning overall score below 54%.

[Fluffy]

I have seen a couple of spanish junior champions (different years) getting a money price and a thropy, one of them underlast, the other last. I don't remember exact percentages, but below 35% probably.

[barmar]

MarkDean, on Feb 19 2009, 03:06 PM, said:

Perhaps slightly off topic, but this weekend at a stratified pairs at a regional, I saw a pair win master points for first in the section in C with 37.xx%.

I do not think I have ever seen a winning overall score below 54%.

I remember when I was a flight C player, I once did that at an NABC in a side game. This typically happens when there are only a couple of flight C pairs sitting each direction in the section. It's not uncommon for both of them to get scores in the 30's, and the one that gets the high 30's gets all the strat C masterpoints, not to mention a section top award.

I felt bad when I did this, but they don't let you refuse the masterpoints. Although I knew some players who bought entries in a higher strat, because they wanted to earn any awards they got.

[manudude03]

I once had a night where we won with 53% while last place was on 48%. I remember the director saying that it could well be a 5 way tie (was only 2.5 tables)

[JoAnneM]

I wonder what the hands were like. I envision flat hands, not a lot of distribution, not a lot of shuffling of the cards! Maybe you need to play "52 pickup" with each deck.

[helene_t]

barmar, on Feb 19 2009, 04:51 PM, said:

That's certainly unusual, especially for such a small game. Usually small games result in bigger score ranges, because fewer comparisons allows randomness to produce bigger swings.

The variance of the (matchpoints per board divided by the top) is somewhere between zero (all tied) and 1/12 (no ties) for infinity tables. For two tables it will be between zero and 1/4, For n tables the max population variance is
[1] 2 0.25
[1] 3 0.1666667
[1] 4 0.1388889
[1] 5 0.125
[1] 6 0.1166667
[1] 7 0.1111111
[1] 8 0.1071429
[1] 9 0.1041667
[1] 10 0.1018519

So the no-tie variance decreases with the number of tables. OTOH, suppose there are only two plausible scores which in a large field would be about equally frequent. Then the matchpoint variance for infinity tables is 1/16 but for a small number of tables it is not clear in which direction it goes: the fact that the contingencies may deviate from 50/50 makes the variance smaller, but the fact that some ties are removed due to the fact that a table is not compared to itself makes the variance larger. Here are average per-board variances based on 1000 simulations per tourney size, number of table are 2,3 ..10:
0.16200000 0.10771875 0.08758519 0.08151042 0.07644343 0.07362760 0.07217363
0.07108857 0.07001185

Finally, ignoring the above, the more pairs there are the higher the chance that someone will get more than say 53%.

[mikegill]

Here is the most interesting one I've seen, although from a multiple-section game that was scored across the whole A/X field. A <50% won one direction and in the other a 57.5% got you nothin (actually all the way up to a 61% would have got you nothin). It also featured a 25% game which is the worst I've even seen in an A/X field.

[ArtK78]

mikegill, on Feb 26 2009, 10:26 AM, said:

Here is the most interesting one I've seen, although from a multiple-section game that was scored across the whole A/X field. A <50% won one direction and in the other a 57.5% got you nothin (actually all the way up to a 61% would have got you nothin). It also featured a 25% game which is the worst I've even seen in an A/X field.

I have never seen a game which was scored across the field which was not ranked across the field (except in ACBL games on BBO).

[mycroft]

We had an odd game last week: 7 tables, 3 scores over average N/S, 2 E/W. I've seen 6/14, but I'm not sure I've seen 5/14 or worse...