[blackshoe]

Well, maybe it's not strictly correct, but I can't think of a better term. I'm open to suggestions.

[Vampyr]

gnasher, on 2012-December-08, 03:54, said:

Just to be clear, I'm comparing two pointlessly bad methods. The obvious way to run this event is with two sections, playing the same boards, and matchpointed across the field. Seeding would also help, but it seems a bit over the top for a club game.

Why do you think that this is definitely better than a one-section web movement? The latter seems to me to be a bit better.

To the poster who mentioned moving the boards correctly -- so long as you have more than one set of boards, you don't have to do any fancy moving of boards to run a web. Half of the stationary pairs play the boards from the top down and the other half from the bottom up, but the boards move between tables as usual.

[awm]

Antrax, on 2012-December-08, 12:36, said:

That's not how I know the term "seeding" is typically used. Is it different for Bridge?

The purpose of seeding is to make sure that in a tournament where not every team will play every other team, all the teams (or at least all the teams in contention) have an equally difficult "schedule." This takes a somewhat different form in a pairs movement than in a single or double-elimination type format of course.

For pairs, you generally want to spread the better pairs evenly through the field. This makes sure that no one gets an "easy section" (if there are multiple sections) or an "easy direction" (in a Mitchell type movement) or simply fails to reach the good pairs (in a movement with more tables than rounds). The director will also typically set things up so that if there is a "skip" in the movement, top pairs are not skipping over other top pairs.

[paua]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-08, 16:06, said:

Well, maybe it's not strictly correct, but I can't think of a better term. I'm open to suggestions.

Seeding = ranking the pairs top to bottom

The process of then sewing them evenly throughout the room is different.
Maybe this should be called scattering ? Spreading ? Dispersal ?

[gnasher]

Vampyr, on 2012-December-08, 22:19, said:

Why do you think that this is definitely better than a one-section web movement? The latter seems to me to be a bit better.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. I was only comparing different configurations of Mitchell movements. I don't know anything about the web movement, except that it's clever.

[gnasher]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-08, 11:24, said:

Let's say you have ten tables. 50% of your players are stratum A. That's ten pairs. Insist that the A pairs sit either NS or EW at the odd numbered (or even numbered) tables. Half of these pairs will complain because they want a NS, but at least you've ensured that all ten pairs aren't sitting in the same (NS) field.

Are you sure about that? It seems to me that if you play all ten rounds, it doesn't matter where the strong pairs start as long as you have five in each line. If, on the other hand, you play five rounds without a share-and-relay, your strong EW pairs will play only the odd-numbered sets, so they'll compare only with other strong EWs. With an intermediate number of rounds, you will get intermediate goodness.

[blackshoe]

gnasher, on 2012-December-09, 03:48, said:

Are you sure about that? It seems to me that if you play all ten rounds, it doesn't matter where the strong pairs start as long as you have five in each line. If, on the other hand, you play five rounds without a share-and-relay, your strong EW pairs will play only the odd-numbered sets, so they'll compare only with other strong EWs. With an intermediate number of rounds, you will get intermediate goodness.

Part of the purpose of the method is to ensure that you do have five in each line. And I was assuming a complete movement. I grant you that's problematic with ten tables and a straight Mitchell. Off the top of my head, perhaps an Appendix Mitchell would work better.

Around here, if the director was going to curtail a ten table Mitchell, he'd stop at nine rounds.

[Vampyr]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-09, 19:28, said:

Part of the purpose of the method is to ensure that you do have five in each line. And I was assuming a complete movement. I grant you that's problematic with ten tables and a straight Mitchell. Off the top of my head, perhaps an Appendix Mitchell would work better.

Around here, if the director was going to curtail a ten table Mitchell, he'd stop at nine rounds.

A form of Double Hesitation Mitchell works well for 10 tables, and you play a lot more opponents than with an appendix or curtailed Mitchel. Of course it doesn't work for 2-winner movements.

[blackshoe]

Personally, I prefer one-winner movements, but I'm in a small minority here - more people get masterpoints with two-winner movements, and that seems to be the goal (as opposed to testing your mettle as a bridge player).

[mycroft]

One thing that I find odd, given that masterpoint donation is the goal of club games, is that "everybody" would prefer a 7-table Mitchell, paying 3 places each way 0.70/0.49/0.35, to a 7-table Howell, playing 13 pairs instead of 7, and paying 6 places starting from 1.40/0.98/0.70. The Mitchell may pay another place or two with different numbers, but the *amount* awarded in the one-winner movement is hugely higher.

I can understand wanting to play 7x4 instead of 13x2, especially in a Howell where one slow pair will cause twice the havoc of a two-board Mitchell movement (I have never had a 7-table Howell play 26 in the time the Mitchell plays 28); but that's not the reason the "bowel movements" (yes, that's a quote I've heard) are despised. I guess there's just too many Lords of the Table that hate there not being a Table for them to be Lord of.

[blackshoe]

mycroft, on 2012-December-10, 17:12, said:

I guess there's just too many Lords of the Table that hate there not being a Table for them to be Lord of.

ROFL!! Good point, that.

[pigpenz]

Antrax, on 2012-December-08, 12:36, said:

That's not how I know the term "seeding" is typically used. Is it different for Bridge?

generally in ACBL events when matchpoint events used to be large before the advent of 50 brackets of KO's the only game
in town were the pairs events.

generally 3,6,9 were seeds with table 3 being the top seed.

[kevperk]

Actually, correcting the Bridgepad data is not that difficult to fix, but most don't know how.

blackshoe, on 2012-December-07, 14:26, said:

Nobody around here holds conversations in the bar after the game any more.

Ideally, I think, you would seed all four fields, however many sections you have. One director here used to do that by putting a card on every fourth table that said "only A players here" or the equivalent. Of course, these days we get about half the NS's reserved for people with physical problems. It is true, IME, that if you let players randomly pick where to sit, or if you have a lot of relatively good players with physical problems, you end up with unbalanced fields.

Monday, we had "overalls" in our one section Web movement (17 tables, 26 boards, 13 rounds, 3 board sets). The EW pair who did best in that field got more masterpoints than the NS pair who did best in their field. There was no arrow switch. This makes no sense to me, but the program (ACBLScore) allows it, so the directors here assume it must be okay. I suppose it is, if your purpose is to give away masterpoints.

Heh. Another interesting thing that happened, irrelevant to this thread: there was a scoring correction, and new results were sent out. On one board, two NS pairs got 1430 for a shared top. However, one table played the board in 6S by NS making. The other, according to the report, played it in 5D by EW, down one. I'm told that the problem is that while it's easy to correct scores after the game in ACBLScore, that doesn't affect what the Bridgepad system thinks happened, correcting the Bridgepad data is difficult or impossible, and the contracts come from the bridgepads.

[barmar]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-07, 14:26, said:

Monday, we had "overalls" in our one section Web movement (17 tables, 26 boards, 13 rounds, 3 board sets). The EW pair who did best in that field got more masterpoints than the NS pair who did best in their field. There was no arrow switch. This makes no sense to me, but the program (ACBLScore) allows it, so the directors here assume it must be okay. I suppose it is, if your purpose is to give away masterpoints.

If your NS and EW fields are reasonably balanced, a pair that has a 70% game in one direction has done much better than a pair that got "only" 60% in the other direction. Why don't they deserve a bigger award?

[blackshoe]

Well, for starters, your premise ("If your NS and EW fields are reasonably balanced") is wrong.

[barmar]

blackshoe, on 2013-January-09, 12:15, said:

Well, for starters, your premise ("If your NS and EW fields are reasonably balanced") is wrong.

Shouldn't we try to avoid that? We don't want players to be significantly advantaged or disadvantaged due to the direction they happen to sit.

[blackshoe]

Yes we should. Clubs around here don't.

[barmar]

OK, a club that doesn't balance the field probably shouldn't give overall awards.

But of course they won't change their practices. If they cared about fairness, they'd be balancing the field in the first place. Catch-22.

[mycroft]

If you have a 10-table game, and 5 pairs are mobility-challenged (and usually they're the better, but not the best, pairs), and there are those who will come an hour early because it's their God-given right to sit North, it's almost impossible to balance the field. Arrow-switches and one-winner movements are your friend - at least when giving out overalls.

And in the case above, it's usually the E-W pair that wins the overalls, because the N-S field is so averagely better that the two or three sharks in the weaker pairs E-W tend to score disproportionately high.

[Vampyr]

barmar, on 2013-January-09, 10:21, said:

If your NS and EW fields are reasonably balanced, a pair that has a 70% game in one direction has done much better than a pair that got "only" 60% in the other direction. Why don't they deserve a bigger award?

Maybe they do, but combining two lines to produce "overall" results does not make it a one-winner game.