[hotShot]

Hi!

How are players seated when a tourney starts ?

One should try to order them by their skill level.
Starting with an 'expert-expert' section, over 'expert-advanced' down to a 'novice-novice' section.

Depending on the movement or tournament type the players can be seated in a way, that they play opponents with the same skill level or the same tournament result.

Having set your skill level correctly will than result in more fun playing tournaments.

Have a nice day
hotShot

[Free]

Would be a nice idea, but then everyone has to admit he's an expert or novice or whatever. And many people just won't do that, and overrate/underrate themselves. If one expert pairs puts himself as novice, all novices are screwed, and that pair will win with ease.

So quite impossible to use...

[Rain]

I am also interested in how to determine seating for player when tourney starts.

But I disagree with the suggestion of ranking players by self-rating, then pairing them against each other.

If tourney is swiss type, better players end up playing together. If its other movements (mitchell in BBO?) the first seating should be random, otherwise scoring becomes biased.

If "fun" from tourney is derived from winning, which I would suspect is the case for most people, then there is no incentive to rate accurately, but to underrate.

If "fun" derived from playing against better opponents, again incentive to overrate.

rain

[uday]

If i recall correctly, seating is random ( not really random, i understand, but i do tell the machine to "randomize" the pairings as best it can).

Unless we have ratings, and probably not even then, pairing by strength will not be possible.

[Chamaco]

Regardless of feasibility or not on BBO, I would be intersted to know if somewhere someone has developed, in real life bridge, a criterion for seating the players using a reliable ranking (e.g. natinal ranking) for matchpoints events.

In italy, after the first half of the tourny, some pairs (usually the even numbered) change direction, and the final standing are computed in a single standing list for both directions (E-W and N-S).

1) This is highly sensitive to the strength of players sitting on the NS dir vs those sitting E-W: it may happen that the first in the EW direction has, say, 56% whereas the first pair NS has around 70%, an obvious bias;

2) it is also sensitive to the number of tables. Especially with less than 10 tables, results may be quite random, and an appropriate sorting could at least reduce the bias.