[whereagles]

Portugal. Selection goes as follows:

1. Four-session matchpointed pairs. Some of the best pairs are exempt from this stage. 24 pairs qualify.

2. Two 12 players poules. Imp pairs with VP conversion (Datum = mean). 12 pairs (6 from each poule) qualify.

3. One 12 players poule. Imp pairs with VP conversion. 8 pairs qualify.

4. One 8 players poule. Imp pairs with VP conversion and carry-over from stage 3.

1st and 2nd pairs qualify for the national team. Winner chooses 3rd pair from pairs qualified in 3rd, 4th or 5th place. This way to choose 3rd pair is highly controversial but so far winners have used the common sense solution of always picking pair in 3rd place.

[NickRW]

cardsharp, on Mar 8 2010, 08:37 AM, said:

Denmark Scotland is a small country and all strong players know each other well, so there will rarely always be social problems with forming a 'dream team' for each separate event.

Perhaps time to move

Yes. Well. I had the (mostly) good fortune to spend a couple of years of my life in Scotland. I noticed that, when the opponents are the English, a tremendous social cohesion breaks out among the Scots based on the general agreement of "lets beat the sassenachs to pulp".

Unfortunately, the warrior like tendencies disperse when there isn't a common enemy.

Nick

[mycroft]

fred, on Mar 6 2010, 12:33 PM, said:

The system in Canada (where I used to play) is different - it is similar in nature to the ACBL's Grand National Teams (teams qualify to represent their districts and then play a round robin to qualify for a knockout). For Canada, this is a sensible way to do things IMO, but historically the Canadian system has not done as good a job as the USA system in terms of qualifying what most would consider to be "the best teams that entered".

You will be pleased to know not care at all that Step 2 has been removed for the CNTC as of last year - it's still a club qualifier, but then it's "make your teams, register byt 24 March, show up in Markham." No Zone qualifier, no zonal quotas, no team location restrictions. Still full RR->KO, though.

[Gerben42]

Quote

On this occasion another 2 cents.... I wonder a bit, why the acting world champions have to qualify for the next BB. In my opinion they earned with this great achivement the right to defend this title automatically. Would it be not fair?

The USBF could of course add a regulation that in case a US team wins the BB, that they will automatically be USA1 next time if the same 6 play and have a bye to the qualifying final if 5 out of 6 play. That's up to them. A similar solution might be taken by the EBL of course.

[Fluffy]

given that they lose money doing so, it seems pretty impossible for USBF.

About the EBL... do they award the qualify to teams or to countries? I think to countries, so no point either if the team that won BB is not gonna play the next BB but some others from the same country.

[Aberlour10]

Gerben42, on Mar 8 2010, 12:33 PM, said:

The USBF could of course add a regulation that in case a US team wins the BB, that they will automatically be USA1 next time if the same 6 play.

That was my primary thought

[Fluffy]

The qualifiers for the open in the european bridge championships will be held this weekend.

So far a strong team of 4 "top" players have signed up, we had been talking long ago to play with 2 of them or maybe the others or all together, but what has happened is that a sponsor has hired them and they quickly left us alone.

The other decent players are with another sponsor, and now dad and me are left with nobody lol. Maybe we go and play witha couple of juniors and see if we can ***** up with all of them.

[Gerben42]

Sorry to hear that, that's their loss and your bad luck...

[mrdct]

rogerclee, on Mar 7 2010, 09:27 PM, said:

awm, on Mar 7 2010, 07:04 PM, said:

I do think the Victoria method (teams competition, then pairs competition which the members of winning team cannot compete in, then top three pairs play against winner of teams competition) is quite good. This seems to avoid the problems inherent in both teams and pairs trials. The well-known issues with pairs trials include: (1) teams that know/trust/like each other usually do better than teams composed of unrelated good pairs (2) some players may not want to play on teams with particular others (3) captaincy/sit-out issues on teams composed of pairs (4) imp pairs is particularly random format and may lead to at least one "weak" pair in the top three. However there are also a number of problems inherent in teams trials such as: (1) the best pairs may not end up on the same team due to social and/or sponsorship issues (2) a very strong pair may have trouble "breaking in" to the team if people don't know about them and/or they are not full-time professional players, since they have issues getting good teammates (3) teams competition often favors professional teams since a weak sponsor can hire five strong players and make the national team, even though the team would clearly be stronger if the sponsor were replaced with a stronger player.

Why is this a good idea at all? It seems like this takes a long time (adding to logistic costs and making everyone more tired) with no compelling positive reasons to me, other than making some people happy who think they are so unlucky that they are constantly not good enough to get on the best teams.

The original poster was from Belarus and I suspect the vast majority of its top bridge players live in or near it main city, Minsk, so I thought the Victorian example would be of interest.

I haven't fully analysed it, but my general observation is that the self-formed Pennant team wins the open team play-off about 80-90% of the time and generally performs much better than Butler teams in the target event. Also, the years in which a "surprise" team has won the Pennant generally coincides with the years in which the Butler team wins the play-off so it is a good safety measure.