Last Updated: 10 PM, Saturday Nov 06 2004 Pacific Time

Sharodiyo Bridge tournament at Dakshini, 2004 

REGISTRATION

This will be a pairs tournament. Please submit your teams (of two) to Arun Saha at arunksaha@yahoo.com. Include name of both players, their addresses, telephone number(s) and email addresses. 

Please visit this page for further updates, announcements and results about the tournament.

Email registrations are preferred. If you can't do that, please show up sufficiently before the tournament begins. Early registration will facilitate planning the pair movement schedule. Participating teams are encouraged to read the introduction to pairs tournament.

Full coverage of 2003 tournament.

INTRODUCTION TO  PAIRS TOURNAMENT

The advantage of pairs tournament is that the luck factor about the dealing of cards is totally eliminated. Half of the pairs will play the same hands in turn. Other half will play the other set of same hands in turn. The objective of a pair is to perform best with the given deal of cards.

DUPLICATE BOARD

Four sides of a table are marked as compass points: North (N), South (S), East (E) and West (W). N and S form the partnership in a table. So are E and W. Typically N-S pairs do not change tables. On the other hand, E-W pairs move from table to table in a strict schedule determined by the tournament director. There will be duplicate boards to move the hands from one table to another. A duplicate board contains four slots, marked as N, E, S and W, to store the cards. A duplicate board also marks the dealer of the hand and vulnerability.

PLAY:

While playing a deal, cards will not be thrown at the middle of the table. Each player, including dummy, places his card in front of them turning them face down after the trick is over. A player can examine the cards played of the last played trick as long his own card remains face up. Tricks won are placed vertically, pointing towards the partner. Tricks lost are placed horizontally, pointing to the opponents. Thus, counting won/lost tricks or retracing the order of play is easy at the end of the deal. Dummy is not allowed to suggest any play of card to the declarer, not even looking at declarer's cards.

In the first round (typically four deals), players will shuffle and deals cards, play them, and put them appropriately in the corresponding duplicate board. In the subsequent rounds, players will receive the cards from the duplicate boards, play them and again replace them in the same slot as it came. Before inserting a played hand into a duplicate board slot, the player should sort the thirteen cards of the hand according to the suits.  

SCORING:
Each board is scored separately.. Scoring depends on the vulnerability indicated on the board. 
(1) Honors do not count.
(2) For bidding and making a part-score, add 50 to the trick total.
(3) For bidding and making a game not vulnerable, add 300 to the trick total.
(4) For bidding and making a game vulnerable, add 500 to the trick total.
There are several bonuses and penalties, details of which can be found in the scoring reference. The result obtained on the board is entered on the "Traveling score sheet" at the back of the board. It is both pairs' responsibility to check that the score entered is correct. Players should not look at that until the hand is over, since it contains a record of the hand and also how other pairs fared on the board. 

PAIR MOVEMENT:
Assume there are 4 N-S pairs, named as NS-1, NS-2, NS-3, NS-4 and 4 E-W pairs, named as EW-5, EW-6, EW-7, EW-8 playing the tournament. One possible schedule of pair and board movement can be the following:

Boards are named from 1 to 16. There be 4 boards per round.

This is 4-pair Mitchell movement. Every N-S pair plays with every other E-W pair and vice versa. All pairs play all the 16 boards in different order. This is also illustrates why a pair may not look into the traveling score sheet at the back of a board.

COMPARING SCORES:
The most important thing to realize is that the real opponents of a pair are not the pairs they play with at different tables. The real opponents of a N-S pair are the other N-S pairs. Same with E-W. The raw score obtained at each hand is scaled (see example below) to International Match Point (IMP) score according to this scaling chart. IMPs scored by each pair are added up at the end of the tournament. Based on the aggregate IMPs (higher the better) the performance of each pair is determined. There will be two separate orderings, one for the N-S pairs and one for the E-W pairs.

Lets take an example to better understand how pairs receive score from a particular board. Consider the following fictitious scores at Board#1 (both vul) as obtained from the Traveling score sheet attached to the board

Fictitious Traveling Score Sheet #1, before scaling to IMP

Tournament director receives the score sheet filled up with this much detail. Now what remains is the conversion of raw scores to IMP scores. In the above hand the average score of NS pairs is (620+680+1430+500)/4 = 2980/4 = 807.50. NS-1's score relative to the average is 620-807.5=-187.50 which is -4.44 IMPs as obtained from the IMP scaling chart. Similarly, NS-3's IMP score is 1430-807.50=622.50, transferred to IMPs become +11.18. For the E-W pairs the average score of the board is -807.5. EW-1's score relative to the average is -620-(-807.50) = 187.50 which is equivalent to +4.44 IMPs. It must be evident now that the loss of IMP's by one pair is the gain of the other pair at the corresponding table. The completed score sheet of the board is given below.

Fictitious Traveling Score Sheet #1, after scaling to IMP

For this board, the relative ordering (best to worse) is given by (one is reverse of another):

    NS pairs: NS-3, NS-2, NS-1, NS-4

    EW pairs: EW-5, EW-8, EW-7, EW-6 

Results and Pictures

Sharodiyo 2004 Bridge Tournament at Dakshini came out to be quite an illustrious affair. There were eight pairs and the tournament proceeded in four tables. This is quite remarkable as only eleven players showed up last year . And since sixteen is a multiple of four, it was easier to schedule the movement of players and boards. Anyway, lets get into the facts.

The North-South (NS) pairs were:

The East-West (EW) pairs were:

The schedule of board and player movement given above is followed. 

Some pictures taken during the first round.

(clockwise from left) Satyabrata Samanta, Prabir Dutta, Swadhin Mandal, Bikash Seth

(clockwise from left) Ram Ganguly, Subhadip Chattopadhyay, Kamalendu Ganguly, Arun Saha

(clockwise from left) Rup Chatterjee, Mohit Chatterjee, Nirmalya Ghosh (Tournament Director), Shyam Ganguly, Manotosh Das

One interesting thing was, among the sixteen hands (dealt randomly during first round), two were slam hands. 

In Board#3 the deal was

Only at Table-1, North-South players could bid a small slam (made 7H)  and earned lot of IMPs. The bidding went on this way

Another slam appeared in Board#16. This time for East-West. The deal was

At Table-3, EW-5 bid (and made) it. The bidding went like this

It was very good turn out, keeping in mind that it is a social tournament. NS-1 (Ram Ganguly and Kamalendu Ganguly) topped the North-South pairs with 25.86 IMPs. EW-5 (Subhadip Chattopadhyay and Arun Saha) topped the East-West pairs with 46.36 IMPs. The team NS-4 (Bratin Das and Anindya Das) finished very close among the N-S pairs.. 

THANKS

Thanks to Sudeshna Seal and Kalachand Seal for their behind the scene support, thanks to Nirmalya Ghosh for directing the tournament and Diptikalyan Saha, Arindam Samanta for organization assistance. Thanks to Ananda Mohan Panja and Arup Bhattacharya for playing as substitutes. Thanks to the spouses of the players for being patient, since the tournament ran quite long. A big thanks to all the players for their participation and co-operation. And above all, thanks to Dakshini for hosting this exciting tournament. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
1. http://www.bridgeguys.com/FGlossary/FourTables.html

2. http://www.indoindians.com/bridge.htm

Page created by Arun Saha.