Three dogs fighting for a bone.
As I wrote last week, the next world championship started on the 10th, these are the “14th World Bridge Games”, formerly known as the Olympiad. It used to be a bridge only event but, since 2008, it is part of the World Mind Games (WMG) together with Chess, Checkers, Go and Chinese Chess.
The format of the event is close to what is being used in other events at this level: the teams are split into groups. Each group plays a full round robin of short (16 board) matches, scored in VP, with the top 4 or 5 teams qualifying for a knock-out stage. In the KO stage, the teams play longer matches until a winner emerges on Thursday. 60 countries participate, with 43 also sending a women’s team, and 34 also a seniors team. All matches play the same boards, which can lead to some curious results. Take this hand:
At table 1, east playing stone-age Blue Club, the hand is from the seniors, opened 1♥, 11-16 with 4♥ and possibly a longer second suit. South made a not unreasonable 2♣ bid, a negative double from west to get the pointed suits in the picture and was happy to defend with his ♣AQT84. Down 3, 800 away.
At table 2, the 1♦ was precision, 11-15, no 5 card major. Again the same overcall, again a negative double, and again east was happy to defend. Down 3, another 800.
At table 3, 1♣ showed 2 or more in an otherwise natural system. NS had the agreement that 2♣ is natural here. The continuation was familiar, so another 800.
OK, so that is 3 times down 800 on a hand where nobody did anything unreasonable. One can argue that the club suit is too weak for a vulnerable 2 level overcall, but then again, it does take away a lot of space for EW. What is so curious about this then? Well, the 3 800 scores were all scored by members of the same family: at table 1, Danish player Peter Schaltz was south, playing for the Danish senior team, at table 2, his wife Dorthe playing for the Danish women team suffered the same 800 penalty. At table 3, their son Martin, playing for the Danish open team was sitting west. He recovered some of the family losses by scoring plus 800.
At the time this blog is being written, the qualifying rounds are still in progress. The Dutch women comfortably lead their group and the seniors are well below a qualifying spot. Neither result is a surprise. What is more surprising, is that the Dutch open team is struggling to qualify. After a slow start, they recovered quite well and by Sunday afternoon, they averaged about 20 vp’s and comfortably led the group. Then they met Guadeloupe, a country with 185 registered players, that hasn’t won a match in ages. The result?
The Dutch lost by 49 imp’s or 4-25 VP.
Fortunately, for the players, the match wasn’t put on vuegraph and no play records are available, so we cannot tell exactly who is to blame for what. That meant that the Dutch dropped to 4th places and, what is worse, their self-confidence seemed to have suffered a big blow. In the following matches, they only averaged 18 VP’s. This morning’s results against the new leader Germany weren’t that good either. This match was, of course, on vuegraph at bridgebase.com.
Before discussing the hands, time to complain... For years, the online vuegraph was run by Roland Wald. Roland did the coordination, scheduling which matches were to be broadcasted but also assigning commentators to the matches. That was a lot of work, but with one good result: whenever a match was broadcasted, you could be sure that there were 2 to 4 commentators. More commentators is not useful, in fact, it then turns into a match in a match, namely, who can analyze the hand the quickest and find some double dummy line to make a contract. It is as if 3 dogs are fighting for a bone.
Less than 2 commentators isn’t good either, a single commentator can easily miss a point and not all commentators know all systems. The system with the manual coordination worked fine for years. Recently, something changed though in the system behind the vuegraph. This apparently wasn’t communicated well between the people involved and our vuegraph coordinator decided to resign. Without a coordinator, the system was changed. Now anybody from a selected but large group can join any match and start to comment on the match in progress. The result, yesterday evening I was watching a match with about 12 commentators in action. As you can imagine, a discussion between 12 with no moderation, is impossible to follow. At the same time, other matches were broadcasted without commentators, which is not nice either.
So, Fred, Roland, and whoever else is involved here, please do whatever is needed to make sure that matches are broadcasted with a reasonable number of commentators, and the available commentators are spread equally over the matches.
That said, what about the match between Germany and Holland? Well, there isn’t much to say about it. The hands were pretty uneventful and the Dutch weren’t at the top of their game. Over the first 12 boards, the Germans outscored them by 23-0, with a bunch of small swings. Nothing special, just a trick more here, stopping a level lower there. Near the end, the Dutch tied the match when they didn’t bid a marginal game and the Germans suffered this accident.
At table 1, North opened a strong NT, east overcalled 2♠ to show spades and a minor. West asked for the minor. North was happy to play there, down 2. At the other table, it looks as if north miss-sorted his hand, the convention card lists 2♠ as 5♠-5♦/♣. West had a take-out double and east a penalty pass. Down 4, for 16 imp’s and about 4 VP’s down the drain.
With 2 more qualifying rounds to go, the Dutch are 1 VP away from qualifying so everything is still possible. We should know around 8pm today.