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World Simultaneous Pairs

A gigantic contest - it's worldwide!

By Henry Francis

This is what you can expect when you play in this great event. There will be two separate competitions with completely different hands for each day. This will be a contest like nothing you've ever seen before.

In the past such events as the Epson Pairs produced a worldwide winner, but the results taken from each club were never integrated with results from all the other clubs around the world. Your final score was whatever your percentage was at your own club. This time your scores will be compared with every score at every other club in the world. Anna Gudge and Mark Newton of ECats Ltd have devised a program that will make this possible.

Another major change - this time there will be no arbitrary matchpoints. The number of matchpoints you receive on a board will be the result of matchpointing against the entire field.

How is all this going to work?
It starts with you playing with your partner at your club. The hands will be supplied to every club director. These will be the hands you play. The director will then matchpoint the results to determine the club winners, the same as usual. Then the director will use special software to transmit the results directly to headquarters in Great Britain, where they will be added to the results already received.

The computer will immediately re-score the event to this point, and a new set of results will be produced. These results will be changed every time a new club reports.

When all the clubs have reported, the computer will have all the results from all the games all over the world. It will matchpoint them and produce the winner almost instantaneously.

After the process is complete, every player in the world will be able to access the tournament on his own computer. He will be able to get his personal scorecard, the overall results, all the board frequencies, all the hands - even the individual scorecards of some of the experts in whom he may be interested.

Incidentally any unusual results that appear to be possible mistakes will be checked.

Your percentage at the local club most likely will be different from your percentage worldwide. At the club you are matchpointed only against others in your field at the club. Worldwide you will be matchpointed against everyone everywhere. Have a look at our page "Why have my scores changed?" to see the reason for this.

You will be able to see the results on www.msoworld.com. To get an idea of what this is going to be like, you can access http://bridge.ecats.co.uk where the results of a British tournament are being compiled at this moment - or go to www.worldbridge.org and see how the previous World Simultaneous Pairs was scored, with over 30,000 pairs taking part over the two days!

There will be a special MSO heat at the Alexandra Palace in London on those days, and the organizers are hoping that some of those players headed for the World Team Olympiad in Maastricht, the Netherlands, will stop in on their way and play in the London games. The Olympiad gets under way on 26 Aug.

This will be a charity event - a large proportion of the entry fees will be donated to charity.

The games are in addition to the Simultaneous Pairs sponsored by the World Bridge Federation that took place on 2 & 3 June. That event was also scored on the Internet.

The bridge portion of the Mind Sports Olympiad will take place 22-28 August.