Swiss Teams March 28
Swiss teams is a wildly popular tournament event at sectional
and regional tournaments. Traditionally, every Sunday at a
sectional, and Wednesday plus Sunday at a Regional, is dedicated to
a full-day swiss team game.
It's played less often by clubs, so it's unfortunately less familiar
to newer players.
BBO has had team play, but has not supported team tournaments until
recently. They've been working feverishly to get them working as
part of their exclusive contract with the ACBL.
Since the start of the online virtual clubs, every Monday at the
virtual club roundtable the club managers have been asking "When are
we going to have team games?"
I played in my first BBO swiss team tournament about three weeks
ago, with the Duncan bridge club. It was a real treat to play the
format again! My team took second place in the strong field of 17
teams.
Here's how it works
This game will take the place of our Sunday afternoon tournament this
week only.
On Sunday afternoon, you'll find two Pasadena Pomona Downey
tournaments:
- 12:15 499er Swiss (all players must have fewer than 500
masterpoints)
- 12:30 Open Swiss (everyone welcome!)
To register for the game, you will invite your partner just as
you do in a regular pairs game. (There's also a partnership desk
you can use to help find a partner.)
Once you and your partner have registered for the game, there's a
new step: Select your teammates.
If you've already arranged a team, on the Select teammates
screen you'll find your teammates waiting for you if they've
already registered, or they will find you if you registered first.
Invite your teammates to play, and the four of you will appear in
the Entries list, ready for the tournament to begin.
You can see what it looks like on the BBO news page here: https://news.bridgebase.com/2020/11/17/swiss-teams-tournaments/
If you don't select teammates before the event starts, BBO will
automatically match you with another pair to form a team.
You will never play against your teammates.
The Sunday game
We will probably play twenty boards: four rounds of five, or five
rounds of four, depending on how many teams sign up to play on
Sunday. We can hold a game with as few as four teams. (With three, I
believe we can add a team from robots and standby players. We have
to have an even number of teams, so everyone has a head-to-head
opponent.)
I'm taking reservations now for the NLM and Open games on Sunday
afternoon.
- If you already have a team, let me know who you're playing
with.
- If you have a partner but not teammates, I can try to match
you up with another pair before the game
- You can also use the partnership desk, and be available for a
team at game time
The actual play of the game proceeds very much like other BBO
games. You can only tell that it's a team tournament by examining
the score history.
Teams can be four players only (not five or six), and there's no
way to select a particular direction, but you'll always play with
your selected partner.
Each round of the tournament, your team will be matched
head-to-head with another team. The pairings for each next round
will be determined by your victory point record so far, just as in
a face-to-face swiss team game.
Team game scoring
The nice thing about playing teams on BBO is that you don't have
to know about the mechanics of scoring. Everything is taken
care of automatically.
Even so, I'll be dedicating the Saturday morning mini lesson
this week to how team games are played and scored. I'll also try to
spend a few moments to how team scoring affects your bidding
strategy.
"Swiss" is just one format for team games. At a tournament there are
also "round robin" and "knockout" events. Team play is my personal
favorite, and (I believe) the purest and most beautiful format for
duplicate bridge.
One of the awesome things about the swiss format is that
masterpoints are awarded for every match that you win, as well as
awards for the teams who place overall in the event. It's not
uncommon to hold a swiss team game where every team wins some
masterpoints!
I'm excited to be offering a game this Sunday! It should take about
the same amount of time as our regular pairs games. I hope you'll
come play!
Best regards,
Mojo