[CSGibson]

Hi - I'm on my unit board, and we were thinking about doing some special games to encourage mentoring relationships between local life masters and non-life masters. By that, I mean that we would play with the stratifications for a club championship game so that:

flight A was any partnership of two life masters
flight B was any partnership of a life master and a non-life master
flight C was any partnership of two non-life masters.

I've already e-mailed the ACBL to make sure that these strats were ok for a sanctioned game, and they replied that they were fine with it. Is this format already done anywhere? What are the general thoughts about splitting strats like this as a method for encouraging mixing of bridge classes & mentoring relationships?

[Siegmund]

I think it's a nice format; I read about it somewhere in the mid-90s, but seem to recall the option to run a club game this way being taken away in the late 90s. (There used to be a couple kinds of official pro-am/member-guest type of games you could run, which went away, for which they allowed an exception to the usual rule of stratifying by the higher player's points.)

If they said it is OK again, great. (But you'll have to manually enter the strata in ACBLscore and click past a lot of warnings for putting people in "wrong" strata.) I would have pushed a lot harder for this format before stratifying by average masterpoints came in. That is now the more normal way of achieving this same effect.

[blackshoe]

Is this a stratified event, a flighted event, or a strati-flighted event?

[Mbodell]

They have 8 is enough team games with a similar idea where each person counts as 1 point (NLM), 2 points (LM <1500 points), or 3 points (>1500 points) and then each team of 4 needs no more than 8 points. But they strat the team by points.

Same idea here except you have only 2 buckets NLM and LM.

[CSGibson]

blackshoe, on 2012-February-15, 20:50, said:

Is this a stratified event, a flighted event, or a strati-flighted event?

One game with A's, B's, & C's identified, but playing against everyone of every stratification. At the end of the game, a C pair could win points in the A strat, but an A pair could not win points in the flight C strat.

Hopefully that gives you enough information that you can answer your own question (I admit I am not 100% sure of the difference between the three options you gave).

[Zelandakh]

Why not also run a "Pro-Am" mini series of events which is purely for your Flight Bs? Since there is more than one tournament it would encourage the forming of more serious partnerships with better discussion of agreements which will surely be of special benefit to the weaker players. This would also help to make these partnerships more competitive in the club championship game assuming they were held beforehand with the club championship towards the end of the year.

[blackshoe]

CSGibson, on 2012-February-16, 01:17, said:

One game with A's, B's, & C's identified, but playing against everyone of every stratification. At the end of the game, a C pair could win points in the A strat, but an A pair could not win points in the flight C strat.

Hopefully that gives you enough information that you can answer your own question (I admit I am not 100% sure of the difference between the three options you gave).

Stratified.

Flighted: Each flight a separate section; you can play up, but you can't play down.
Strati-flighted: Flighted, but each section is also stratified.
Stratified: The field is divided into groups as you describe above.

It's always confused me that people say "flight" when they mean "stratum".

It looks like you're going to have to put each pair in its appropriate stratum manually, at least for section B.

[barmar]

blackshoe, on 2012-February-16, 11:20, said:

It's always confused me that people say "flight" when they mean "stratum".

It's only confusing if you don't know what the event is. If it's a stratified event, there's no confusion referring to flights, since the context makes it clear -- "stratum" is not in most people's vocabulary.

In ACBL, flighted events are relatively rare. Tournaments often have separate novice games, but we don't call them a flight because they're considered independent events (often the main event will be two-session, while the novice games are single-session).

[blackshoe]

So I haven't been confused, just ignorant. Thanks for clearing that up.