[mike777]

How many top pairs in world..


Lets look at the usa...


67x6 in spingold
20x6 in usbf

now add in world

at some point we look at 100-200 top pairs in world? out of 1-2 million casual players?


I think we forget how few play at the very very top level, today.

[paulg]

The number of visible top pairs in the world is probably a function of the number of rich sponsors.

But I think the #200 pair in Poland could compete quite happily in the quarter-finals of the Spingold.

[rhm]

For becoming a top pair, you usually have to play in a an area, where there is a cluster of top pairs already. You need the competition and you need it frequently.
Many players are not in such an area.
Few players can afford to move to such an area or pay the travel expenses and afford the spare time.
Professional players have a huge advantage, but few areas support such a living.
It is not my impression that the ones, who live from Bridge are necessarily the ones, who are most gifted. Of course there are some.
There are many more gifted players, who will not make it for good reasons: Different priorities.
My impression is more that many, who take this route, are the ones who are most fascinated by the game, which is not the same.

Rainer Herrmann

[Fluffy]

mike777, on 2013-August-09, 02:15, said:

How many top pairs in world..

There are many, depending on whom I am partnering at the moment

[sfi]

Fluffy, on 2013-August-09, 05:05, said:

There are many, depending on whom I am partnering at the moment

Or who I'm playing against.

[awm]

Not all pairs in the Spingold are from the US.

Really this question does not make sense to me. Say you could rank all pairs in the world from best to worst. How far down the "top pairs" go is totally arbitrary. Can the same person be in multiple top pairs? Maybe Hamman plus anyone who can follow suit is a top pair?

[Fluffy]

yeah he has won a major with JLOL so it must be true (I bet justin would had made the same joke)

[blackshoe]

The literal answer to the question is easy: one.

[chasetb]

I just took a hard look, and I think there are truly only 20 top pairs in the world. Pachtmann - Ginossar and Bertheau - Nystrom are close, but considering neither pair made their country's team for the European Championships, I have to leave them out. Dubinin - Gromov are making a great run in the Spingold, but the resent results aren't there for me.

There are also a few great players not on here because they need partners. I would classify Curtis Cheek, Ishmael Delmonte, Thomas Bessis, Dennis Bilde, Boye Brogeland, and Jacek Pzecola as applicable (I would also like to include Erik Saelensminde, but he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth). I know Delmonte and Bessis have played together, but it's not a regular thing. I also get the impression that Alan Sontag is still an outstanding player, but where's the beef?

Pairs I have my eye on are Fisher - Schwartz, Bertheau - Bessis, Upmark - Nystrom, and Ahmady - Sadek.

Meckstroth - Rodwell
Levin - Weinstein
Greco - Hampson
*Grue - Moss
*Hamman - Lall
**Fleisher - Kamil

Balicki - Zmudzinski
Jassem - Martens / Mazurkiewicz - I like Martens better personally
**Buras - Narkiewicz (will move up if Gromov wins the Spingold)

Fantoni - Nunes
**Helgemo - Helness

Lauria - Versace
Bocchi - Madala
**Duboin - Sementa

Brink - Drijver
**Muller - DeWijs
Van Prooijen - Verhees

*Piekarek - Smirnov

*Birman - Padon
*Herbst - Herbst

* - Don't quite have the results as a partnership I would like as of this post
** - At the bottom of the list IMO

[rhm]

awm, on 2013-August-09, 09:47, said:

Not all pairs in the Spingold are from the US.

Maybe Hamman plus anyone who can follow suit is a top pair?

Certainly not.
The weaker partner has a much bigger influence on the overall outcome of a partnership than the stronger one, even if the stronger one handles the partnership well.

Rainer Herrmann

[PhilKing]

http://www.rpbridge.net/9ya1.htm

[Zelandakh]

Notice the Hels in position 6 of Phil's link. I was quite shocked to see chase put them "at the bottom of the list".

[Phil352]

Zelandakh, on 2013-August-12, 04:31, said:

Notice the Hels in position 6 of Phil's link. I was quite shocked to see chase put them "at the bottom of the list".

Assuming the list chase made doesn't count boards since 1996. Given that this was 17 years ago, that's quite a lot of time for bridge to move on/partnerships to decay. The results will be slightly loaded to the present just because of more vugraph probably but still not enough to correct.

[cherdano]

paulg, on 2013-August-09, 02:55, said:

But I think the #200 pair in Poland could compete quite happily in the quarter-finals of the Spingold.

Double.

[paua]

cherdano, on 2013-August-12, 05:30, said:

Double.

looks like it now

[mikeh]

rhm, on 2013-August-10, 07:35, said:

Certainly not.
The weaker partner has a much bigger influence on the overall outcome of a partnership than the stronger one, even if the stronger one handles the partnership well.

Rainer Herrmann

I disagree, to a degree

I think that your statement is correct when the weaker player is a lot weaker than the stronger one. However, I think a very strong player can carry an expert who is good but not at the same level. The stronger player makes the weaker player better, at least in a good partnership.


Look at Hamman-Wolff. I don't think there was ever any question about who was the truly gifted player in that partnership. Going back a few decades, Roth-Stone were, in their day, one of the top pairs, but who remembers Tobias Stone? Miles-Kantar: Miles never approached the same heights with any other partner, yet Kantar went on to a lot of success.

In the earlier days of the Blue Team, the stars were (I know the lineup changed a lot) Belladonna, Garozzo and Forquet, and they played and won a lot with other team members.

I think this applies at all levels. Speaking from personal experience, there was a brief time in the late 1990s when I was a member of arguably the best imp pair in Canada at the time, but I don't think even my wife thinks that I was ever as good as my partner, who was (imo) the best player in Canada at the time.

[the hog]

There is only one top pair in the world, of course. There are many excellent pairs in the world

[32519]

I think mikeh's post nailed it. The stronger player can adjust downwards to what the weaker partner knows in all facets of the game, whether it be system, conventions, defensive signals etc (add whatever you wish to this). The only way the weaker player can ever adjust upwards is to raise their overall knowledge, level of play etc.

[rhm]

32519, on 2013-August-14, 06:33, said:

I think mikeh's post nailed it. The stronger player can adjust downwards to what the weaker partner knows in all facets of the game, whether it be system, conventions, defensive signals etc (add whatever you wish to this). The only way the weaker player can ever adjust upwards is to raise their overall knowledge, level of play etc.

If you like mikeh consider Wolff to be a second rate player I tend to agree.
But I do not concur with the IF.

Rainer Herrmann

[rogerclee]

I don't agree that a world class player can carry an expert, and I suspect the difference between a world class partnership and a world class + expert partnership is larger than the difference between that and a partnership of two experts. However, my opinion is very much that world class players (top 100 in the world) are much, much better than experts (say, the 150th-300th best North American players).

There are three issues here to me:

1) It is hard to bid very well with a non-world class player, there are lots of holes in their game, some of them in theory and some of them in practice. In particular, slam bidding is very hard for all players, but especially hard for non-world class players.

2) It is really hard to defend at a world class level where one of the players does not know how to signal appropriately. Knowing how to signal, when it's important, and when it's not, is very hard for a non-world class player to learn how to do, since you have to be on the ball the whole hand to know what is going on and to identify partner's problems.

3) This continues to be a point of debate, but I think world class players are much stronger cardplayers/technicians than mere experts. This is much less true in theory (such as BBO forums, where lots of non-experts are perfectly capable of figuring out complex hands given unlimited effort/time/calculation) than in practice. People who play bridge for a living make far, far fewer careless/stupid errors than people who play fewer than 1500 hands a year. By careless/stupid, I mean a problem that is not even difficult enough to be posted in the intermediate/advanced forum.