Seeding for Easter Congress

Previously, the seedings of teams are very obvious. For e.g., teams that are seeded first are placed as team 1 in that group, seeded second are placed as team 2 in the group.

for this easter congress, there are no obvious seeding. let us analyse how scba split us into groups.

for my group, we got open team, x-men, choowai, blue moon, jason, my team and nuss. for the other group, we got ladies, malaysia, bozzetto, greta, LCY, nus, Dr Siak, GG. Looking at it, it seemed that they only seed 3 teams for each group. e.g. open team, x-men and choowai for one group, ladies, malaysia and bozzetto in the other group. for the other group, it was really a fight between the top 3 teams. for my group, blue moon sneaked ahead of the other 2 teams to secure a place in the finals.

since years ago, i am always baffled by how seeding was done. because somehow some teams often get easier passage to finals, whilst others need to massacre each other in order to survive through. instead of having a closed seeding, why not have some transparent system whereby proper ranking of teams can be done.

one method is to use masterpoints for seeding purposes. however this is seriously flawed, because people who play bridge longer will definitely have more masterpoints. but some younger players are scarier sometimes, e.g. blue moon, mokymouse. so it will not be a true reflection.

another method is to get all the team captains of participating teams to rank all the teams playing this event from 1 to 20 including theirs (max points). then the score is totalled and ranking can be done. a team which is ranked highest is perceived to be strong by many captains. obviously, the captains are unable to know how the others ranked their teams. so strategies for teaming cannot be done. this idea is derived from the world idol - a tv show.

third method is to have a seeding committee who will base on their performance in all the competitions. but their decision have to be transparent, which is obviously not done here.

i do not have any problems with the seedings for this easter. i say these things because i have issues with the seedings for a tournament several years ago. in that tournament, group A has 2 teams who definitely advance, whereas group B has 5 teams fighting it out. not to say the 5 teams are better, but the 5 teams will pose serious threat if they are placed in group A. results of that tournament is top 2 are those who came from group B, not group A.

well, these are some nonsensical comments by me. =)