Seating Rights
Hi
I've got myself involved with updating the conditions of play for the various Devon Bridge Association competiitons, and I find myself perplexed by the issue of "seating rights" for a (head to head) teams match.
I understand how they work, what I don't get is why we have them. WIth an even number of sets, why not just have each pair in the team play the same amount of boards against each pair in the other team? Surely that's fairer than giving a possible advantage to one team?
I appreciate that if there are an odd number of sets, then it might matter, but you could do that by blind assignment (similar to WB 8.5.2).
I have hunted through the various colour books and the laws for enlightenment, but without success.
Jeremy
Comments
It's a good question because I don't know the answer! The effect of seating rights can be interesting though. I once played all six stanzas of a tight 48 board Gold Cup match against the same pair, through the choice of both teams!
Barrie Partridge - CTD for Bridge Club Live
Don't forget not all teams are limited to two pairs.
Apparently the existence of seating rights can have quite some strategic impact when teams consist of more than two pairs, and the pairs are not equal in strength. For example, one strategy that's frequently seen is for teams to play their weakest pairs only when they have seating rights, allowing those pairs to play against only the opponents that they're most comfortable facing (leading to the counter-intuitive result that in many competitions, pairs tend to do worse in the sets where they have seating rights than the sets where they don't).
This makes me suspect that we use seating rights (rather than a round-robin or a blind seating assignment) because it's what the teams playing are most comfortable with.
Many of our county events simply say that a match is played in two halves with a mandatory change of opponents at half time. There is sometimes in addition something on seating rights if there is a team of more than 4.
There is an advantage to specifying who has seating rights (e.g. home team can select who to play in the first half) if only because it has the potential to stop any discussion. If teams want to ignore them, they are welcome to.
Online matches where there is a toss have led to some ingenuity. One of my opponents last year agreed with me that whichever of England or India scored more runs in the first test of a series would have first choice(can't recall what happened if they were tied but vanishingly unlikely). I chose England and lost. Anything is, however, better than watching the computerised coin on WBF computer screens for a good few years which seemed to take an aeon or two to fall just at a time when the players, not to mention the NPC wanted dinner.
EBU regulations say that the home team (first named team in the draw) has won the toss for online matches.