Such stupidity. Interestingly, the national bridge teams event here has a very good way of choosing who plays who in the knockout. The top 8 teams get to chose their round of 16 opponents in turn from qualifiers 9-16. Have often thought they should use that system in more sports, would solve tanking issues pretty quickly.
While obviously the whole badminton fiasco is retarded, I'm not in love with the format of winners selecting their opponents, particularly if the selection is ever motivated by anything other than the quality of the opponents.
If politics or any other nonsense were to ever be perceived to influence the decision, the ensuing commentary would be insufferable.
A few of you know, but let me clarify for the rest: The Bridge World is relevant to Olympic badminton because the magazine has been one of the principal campaigners against event setups that promote "sportsmanlike dumping", i.e., doing less than one's best in part of a conpetition in an effort to increase one's equity in the overall event.
As they have shown, (1) avoiding this scenario is not hard, with thoughtful event design; and (2) notwithstanding that, badly designed events that encourage dumping are common - the magazine has published examples from several dozen sports.
Re solar's hand, I see wanting to bid 4H but not doing it. Assuming pard will prefer hearts to spades with equal lengths, as he should, 4H is very likely best only when he has exactly one more spade than heart, and not even 100% of the time that's true.
And I understand the sympathy for pass, but I'd never choose it. Acting will be right substantially more often than not.
Hand from this evening. We end up in 7H. LHO leads a heart, I draw trumps and and take the spade finesse. LHO has:
Kx
xx
QJxx
Jxxxxx
and we go one down. I think double-dummy we can make it if I ruff out east's last diamond and squeeze west in diamonds and spades. Am I right to take the spade finesse single dummy though?
The direct spade finesse is pretty bad. You must absolutely first ruff a diamond, run all hearts, discarding 3 high spades from dummy and a club on your last heart and see if any opponent has a problem following your pace.
How do you censor/report someone on BBO? Had a guy who mega tilted against me because I Xed him a little light when he raised himself to game after I protected. He went out of line on chat and then started spamming me with tourney invites so my BBO crashed.
Two Plus Two
from partner p p X. Partner couldn't do better than -500 holding:
8 5 4
6 4
T 8 5
Linear Mode
