[mike777]

Do you prefer the current system of picking the USA team via open team trials or would you prefer some system(which) of a Pair trials.

[cherdanno]

Option 3: Cherdanno picks the 3 best pairs for USA1. USA2 can fight it out in ACBL robot individuals or whatever

[jdonn]

cherdanno, on Oct 6 2009, 07:29 PM, said:

Option 3: Cherdanno picks the 3 best pairs for USA1. USA2 can fight it out in ACBL robot individuals or whatever

DONE

In seriousness I much prefer a team selection process to a pairs selections process every day of the week. You aren't selecting an all star lineup of the best players or pairs, you are selecting a TEAM.

[TylerE]

I think the truth of the matter is that if it was a pairs-based process a fairly large number of the top pairs would not enter. Non-playing sponsors are very rare these days.

[NickRW]

The way you guys seem to work in the US with playing sponsors, I think team trials must surely be best for you.

In a country where there aren't many sponsors and it is primarily an amateur affair - well I guess trying to find the 3 best pairs by some sort of hopefully objective process should be better.

Nick

[Jlall]

The three best pairs are not necessarily the best team.

/thread

[aguahombre]

Josh is 130 percent right for acbl......I am not sure about other countries, because i dont know if politics keeps a great pair out.

[Codo]

Jlall, on Oct 7 2009, 11:22 AM, said:

The three best pairs are not necessarily the best team.

/thread

True, but the qualifying TEAM is not necessarily the best avaiable Team either.

So, as Mike asked, it is a mater of opinion, there are no facts.

[quiddity]

Jlall, on Oct 6 2009, 09:22 PM, said:

The three best pairs are not necessarily the best team.

/thread

It seems likely that they would be the best performing team, doesn't it?
Can you imagine asking professional tennis players to form their own teams and holding team trials for the Davis Cup? It's ridiculous.

[gnasher]

NickRW, on Oct 7 2009, 03:13 AM, said:

In a country where there aren't many sponsors and it is primarily an amateur affair - well I guess trying to find the 3 best pairs by some sort of hopefully objective process should be better.

That's a slight overstatement. I think about 25% of the teams in the EBU Premier League (which is described as the "Open Trials", but the sort that guides the selectors rather than binding them) contain playing sponsors. Last year it was nearer to 40%.

[jdonn]

quiddity, on Oct 7 2009, 04:50 AM, said:

Jlall, on Oct 6 2009, 09:22 PM, said:

The three best pairs are not necessarily the best team.

/thread

It seems likely that they would be the best performing team, doesn't it?
Can you imagine asking professional tennis players to form their own teams and holding team trials for the Davis Cup? It's ridiculous.

As always the analogies with bridge and other sports don't hold. What happens in one tennis match doesn't affect your score in your tennis match like the score at the other table does in bridge. You don't have to compare with your teammates at tennis like you do with bridge. The teams in the Davis Cup don't have to choose who will play that day and who will sit out that day like they do in bridge.

[nige1]

This dispute is academic. FWIW, IMO, in the absence of sponsors, pairs trials are better than team trials. Sponsors are a fact of life, however, in most countries, not just in the USA. In all sports and games, professional players tend to defect to where money is best. Hence, for Bridge teams, pairs trials are rare, although they survive in small countries with few professionals, like Scotland.

[awm]

Sponsorship and financial concerns strongly favor a team trial. For this reason, there is unlikely to be a shift to a pairs trial at any point in the near future.

There is a general issue of team leadership. Especially on a six-person team, it's necessary to make some decisions about sit-outs, lineups, and so forth. There have been cases in the past with a pairs trial where this has created some serious issues.

With that said, I'm not convinced that there is that much more to having a successful team than having effective pairs. Predicting what your teammates will do is not that big a part of IMP strategy (and even with teammates you've teamed with for years, predicting can be tough). It does help to have some degree of confidence in the other pairs, and of course a bad team leader who does something like sit the best pair all the time will destroy the team's effectiveness.

However, consider team sports like soccer (football in most of the world). When they select the world cup team, they don't take the winners of the national league (well okay, some of the winners might be from other countries, but they don't make a serious effort to "keep the winning team together") -- instead they produce an all-star lineup of the best eligible players. And there is much more essential interaction between teammates on the same soccer pitch than between the pairs on a bridge team.

There are a lot of concerns in a team trial that diminish the chances of getting the best national team. In particular:

(1) A wealthy sponsor who is a poor player can offer incentives to get many good players on his or her team, yet this team is worse than the same team without the sponsor.

(2) For teams without a playing sponsor, geography is often an issue. Teams tend to form of people who know each other better and have the same local tournaments.

(3) People tend to form teams with their friends (especially when they're not being paid). Obviously a team of people who intensely dislike each other may be problematic, but relative strangers who get along can certainly form a good team.

[fred]

In my experience, good personal chemistry among teammates is very important to a team's performance.

One of the main arguments against a pairs trials (which I happen to agree with) is that the chemistry on a team that came out of such a trials would tend to be poor.

The population of top-level players (in the USA at least) includes some people with massive egos, some people with poor people skills, and some people who are overly sensitive to criticism. There are also plenty of examples of top players who do not like each other personally, do not like each other's style of bridge play, do not respect each other's bridge skills, question each other's ethics, have stolen each other's girlfriends etc. Throwing such people onto a team together is a potential recipe for disaster.

I don't think comparisons with soccer teams, David Cup teams, etc are valid for several reasons.

Money is certainly an issue - just like everyone else, professional bridge players need to make a living. However, I strongly suspect that if members of the USA team were paid generously by the USBF, a corporate sponsor, or a non-playing sponsor, most/all of the very top pairs would still prefer a team trials in which they selected their own teammates.

Naturally under such a scenario, some of those who could not get on a contending team might prefer a pairs trials.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Aberlour10]

I am not very familiar with the history of the US Trials.... Has ever been there a try to "split" the trials and find the teams USA1 & USA2 in two different ways/formats?

Robert

[fred]

Aberlour10, on Oct 7 2009, 06:24 PM, said:

I am not very familiar with the history of the US Trials.... Has ever been there a try to "split" the trials and find the teams USA1 & USA2 in two different ways/formats?

Robert

USA1 and USA2 for the 1991 Bermuda Bowl were selected this way.

To the best of my knowledge, that was the only time.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[NickRW]

fred, on Oct 7 2009, 05:57 PM, said:

...However, I strongly suspect that if members of the USA team were paid generously by the USBF, a corporate sponsor, or a non-playing sponsor, most/all of the very top pairs would still prefer a team trials in which they selected their own teammates....

I strongly suspect you're right as ever Fred - though if the money from the corporate or non playing sponsor was large enough...

Also there is the factor of the team captain. In some sports players are very well paid and some of them are prima donas in one way or another, yet some team managers/coaches seem to do a very good job of blending the non mixing personalities and some suck at it. But I agree that, whichever way you look at it, "team dynamics" play an important part.

Nick

[Gerben42]

Does the USBF pay all expenses for the USA teams? If so, why are so many teams playing with a sponsor? If not, why not?

[fred]

Gerben42, on Oct 7 2009, 09:53 PM, said:

Does the USBF pay all expenses for the USA teams? If so, why are so many teams playing with a sponsor? If not, why not?

The USBF pays for some, but not all, expenses. I would guess that the main reason USBF does not pay more is due lack of funds.

But even if the USBF paid for everything, it would make zero difference to many pros because:

1) Their sponsors pay them a lot of money to play in the Team Trials (and typically a lot of money on top of expenses to play in the World Championships if they win the Team Trials).

2) Many sponsors prefer to make deals in which they hire their pros to play in 3 ACBL NABCs plus the Team Trials. I suspect it would be harder for a top pair to find the best possible job for the NABCs if they told interested sponsors in advance that they would not be available for the Team Trials.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[PeterGill]

I have played for my country in teams selected from Pairs Trials and in teams selected from Teams Trials.

Based on that experience, I agree 100% with Fred.

Also, the results of Australian teams selected by Pairs Trials are much worse than those selected by Teams Trials. Australia's dismal showing in Beijing last year
after Pairs Trials was not an isolated case. I could add a few hundred lines of actual Australian data for the last ten years here, but I will not. The data exists because we alternate Pairs Trials and Teams Trials from year to year.