sitemaster's blog

The Babich NZ-Wide Simultaneous Pairs 2020

Submitted by sitemaster on Fri, 30/10/2020 - 09:21

Welcome to the Bulletin Board if you don't visit this site very often - or even if you do. The scoring for the 2020 Babich commenced soon after 10:00pm. Our first cut of 43 out of 57 clubs was published at 11pm. 661 pairs were reported. The leaders were Vivienne Sexton and Maureen Russ on a whopping 72-something per cent. At 11:20 we were missing just four clubs. Our second cut of 53 clubs netted 819 players with Vivienne and Maureen still undisturbed. Royle Epsom and Taihape came through at 1am so we ran another cut with 848 pairs and 55 of 57 clubs in. All 57 clubs had filed by 10:15am Saturday. An interim final was posted at 10:20.

The final official results are subject to Richard Solomon's confirmation upon expiration of the period for texting him with any scoring corrections (he's playing in the Zelda Morris).

The Wayne Benefield Award for Slowest Club went to Wanaka who had trouble with the scoring. Auckland came a close second by, we suspect, sending their file to the wrong email address. Your scoring team (powered by Bob Fearn's Compass software, two beers and a bottle of Babich pinot gris) of Bob in Seattle, Jan Spaans, Anna Kalma, and Mike Neels in Cambridge is looking forward to next year already.

Vil Gravis on Weak Twos and Transfers

Submitted by sitemaster on Fri, 20/12/2019 - 09:13

So much for taking a break over Christmas! The man can't sleep without a pen in his hand. Vil is favouring us with his thoughts on Weak Twos and Transfers in a new series of articles. This blog will be updated as he sends more articles. For the present we have:

  1. An Overview of Acol basics
  2. Basic Weak Twos
  3. No Trumps and Transfers
  4. No Trump Rebids
  5. Transfers and More
  6. Transfers after 2NT
  7. Opposition 1NT
  8. SSS: A Simple System Summary
  9. Bonus Article on play at No Trumps

If you wish to receive these articles via direct email when they're hot off the press just let Vil (villyn@xtra.co.nz) know and he'll add you to his mailing list.

We have a Wrap at 1:30PM. Results FINAL at 5pm.

Submitted by sitemaster on Sat, 02/11/2019 - 11:36

Yep - all 57 clubs are in after 14 hours. Golden Bay's six tables takes us to 1012 pairs for this year's event. Trish Stevens and Ruth Lewis of Rotorua held on to top spot while Richard Solomon did some in-depth scrutineering. The full set of results is NOW PUBLISHED AND WILL BE DECLARED FINAL AT 5PM TODAY (Saturday 2nd Nov). Please advise Richard Solomon (Richardharoldsolomon@gmail.com) of any scoring corrections before then.

Update at 10:30AM

Submitted by sitemaster on Sat, 02/11/2019 - 07:54

The X-Clubs results site is now working. We are posting just the Overall ladder for now - Overall and club sections containing full drill-down capability will follow. The ladder you see is sortable by clicking on any green column header. We have 55 of 57 clubs in totalling 982 pairs - just waiting for Marlborough and Golden Bay who had problems in getting a result out on the night.

Update at 2AM

Submitted by sitemaster on Fri, 01/11/2019 - 22:01

We had 50 of 56 club results - 870 pairs. We hadn't heard from Golden Bay, Marlborough, Marton, Oamaru, Queenstown or Wellington. The website server in Sydney is undergoing some attention to upload the XML. A temporary result is uploaded to the Cambridge website.

How to See Your BABICH Results

Submitted by sitemaster on Fri, 01/11/2019 - 11:24

Publishing soon after maybe 30 of the 57 results that we expect come in, the team at X-Clubs will be constantly updating the ladder as we work. As the evening goes on we would expect to have about 50 clubs ready to publish around midnight .. maybe ALL of them this year. Who knows? 2019 could be the first year when we don't have to chase a few people up on their Saturday.

To see your results click on the Wide View tab above and either go direct to your club or search for your name using CTRL-F (hold down CTRL and push the F key) in the Ladder or the Overall items. The Ladder is sortable by clicking on any green column header while you can drill down in the Overall and the club Section items. Take advantage of the Replay and Analyse feature powered by Bridge Solver On Line (BSOL)when you're looking at the display that lists what everyone did on any particular hand.

.. while you're waiting for the Babich results ...

Submitted by sitemaster on Wed, 16/10/2019 - 17:42

"Mr X-Clubs" aka Michael Neels of Cambridge gets interviewed by Barry and Mereana on The Bridge Zone Show - THREE times!!

  1. About X-Clubs from the 3-minute mark on 16th October
  2. About XG Ratings from the 24-minute mark on 23rd October
  3. About Bob Fearn and the Babich from the 20-minute mark on 30th October

Welcome to the Christchurch Club

Submitted by sitemaster on Sat, 12/10/2019 - 07:41

Members as at Sept 2019Members as at Sept 2019X-Clubs is proud to welcome New Zealand's largest club, Christchurch, as our 38th participating club. Christchurch brings us to half of NZ's largest 16 clubs playing the same deals at any given session. Here is an updated table of which sessions each club plays.
Participating ClubsParticipating Clubs

Evil Acol over 1NT

Submitted by sitemaster on Thu, 15/08/2019 - 11:16

An Excerpt from the Series ”More Evil”

Dealer N Nil Vul

JT2
T93
AJT2
962
64
AK72
Q973
AJ7
KQ93
854
85
KT53
A875
QJ6
K64
Q84

XG's vs Rank

Submitted by sitemaster on Mon, 27/05/2019 - 16:31

SnippetSnippetNow that XG's have been with us for a few months and some 40% of players are progressing from Evolving (less than 1000 boards) to Mature status it seems timely to look at what sort of numbers our higher-ranking players are coming up with. The spreadsheet attached below clearly demonstrates what we all suspected .. top players have top XG's.

The population of 3116, sorted by XG Rating, was divided into 31 bands of 100 players of X-Club deals. Because some of the ranks had small numbers - eg 44 Life Masters vs 1375 Local Masters, the raw numbers would mask the point of the exercise. The chart is presented as the percentages of each rank falling into any particular band. A sample of how to read the chart might be: 50% of the 52 Grand Masters who play X-Club deals have XG's in the top 100 band: 15% in the second band of 100: 12% in the third etc …

Other observations:

  • One third of NZB-affiliated members play X-Club deals
  • Only 40% of these 3116 players have XG's over 50 which translates to 40% have negative handicaps while 60% have positive
  • XG's for top of the table exceed straight averages by some 5%, about equal for middle of the table, 5% lower near the bottom of the table. This seems to indicate that handicapping by straight average (as clubs commonly do) favours the stronger player

Have a look .. it's interesting

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