[oryctolagi]

I'm not sure whether I should be posting this here, but I have a question or two - so here goes.

A few days ago I was lucky enough to secure a place in a fairly informal pairs tourney held by our local U3A. This was organised into seven tables playing 21 boards, scored Match Points. The organiser has E-mailed the results, along with all the travellers, to all participants, and my partner and I came exactly midway: 4th out of seven.

Not a brilliant result but I'm not gutted, at any rate.

Now I'd like to satisfy my curiosity and see whether we'd have got a better placing if it had been scored IMPs rather than MPs. This is purely for my own edification, vanity if you like, and not anything I want to make public - not even to my partner. Just a private thing. One reason is, on one board we were the only pair to reach a slam: in fact we were the only ones to secure a >1000 score, anywhere in the entire tournament (6NTv+1 giving us 1470). I know well that MPs scoring tends to level out big swings....

So the first question is, is there a convenient (and preferably free ) tool I can use, to score up the travellers? Or a plug-in for Excel perhaps. I've got the data in HTML text format at the moment.

Alternatively, if I have to do all the calculations myself, the hard way (I can easily get hold of a points -> IMPs lookup table), how is the baseline in pairs normally calculated? Simple average, sigma-clipped average, highest/lowest excluded average, median, or what?

Any suggestions much appreciated!

[Vampyr]

It seems to me that you can use any scoring program, create an IMP pairs contest, and input the travellers.

There is normally no "baseline" in IMP pairs nowadays; the method used is cross-IMP, ie you are compared with each of the other pairs.

You might wish to score the game as a two-winner game, discarding arrow-switched scores. This will reduce the randomisation introduced by arrow-switching in IMP pairs; the scoring method is not suitable for one-winner movements.

[1eyedjack]

oryctolagi, on 2016-February-21, 04:42, said:

Now I'd like to satisfy my curiosity and see whether we'd have got a better placing if it had been scored IMPs rather than MPs.

I expect that you already know this, but re-scoring the historical MP results under IMP rules would not (reliably) inform you of whether you would have scored better had the event been conducted under those (IMP) conditions.

The appropriate strategy for playing in an IMP-scored event differs significantly from that appropriate to an MP-scored event, and a lot of the actions taken at the table, both in bidding and in card play, at your table and elsewhere, would have been different under different scoring conditions. The table results that you are now scoring up under IMP rules would simply not have arisen, at least on some of the hands.

It may be that some of the players in the event would have played the same way under any scoring conditions. But the better players, whom we can expect to have gravitated to the top of the MP scoring table, and being generally those whom you hope to displace by re-scoring the event, would be those more likely to be aware and more likely to play differently if IMP were the official scoring regime at the time.

[oryctolagi]

1eyedjack, on 2016-February-21, 07:50, said:

The appropriate strategy for playing in an IMP-scored event differs significantly from that appropriate to an MP-scored event, and a lot of the actions taken at the table, both in bidding and in card play, at your table and elsewhere, would have been different under different scoring conditions.

Yes I am aware of that. Bear in mind that my fellow players, although some of them are pretty good players, are not exactly world-class! I think the difference between MP play and IMP play would be lost on some of them - including myself!

Anyway, this is just for curiosity's sake.

[barmar]

If the results are already entered into a scoring program like ACBLScore, you should just be able to change the scoring parameters to switch it from MP to IMP Pairs.