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 -- Morris Jones, Monrovia, CA BridgeMojo <http://bridgemojo.com> Old Town Sidewalk Astronomers <http://otastro.org> Mojo's Blog <http://mojo.whiteoaks.com>