Scoring teams

There was a bit of a disaster at the club this week. There was a bit of a disaster with Blogger too which is why this post is late. We're playing a teams event and the format allowed us to have a closed room and an open room. Problem was the boards that were meant to be duplicated weren't. That led to some heated arguments and disbelief followed by blank expressions and hurried apologies at score up.

On one hand our opponents had missed game; feeling confident with our -170 we called it out only for out team mates to call back -680! In practice it meant that quality auctions like the following were forgotten:

	♠ A Q x x ♥ x x ♦ K ♣ A K J T x x
♠ T x ♥ A Q J x ♦ x x x ♣ Q x x x		♠ x x ♥ K x x x ♦ Q J x x x x ♣ x
	♠ K J x x x ♥ x x x ♦ A x x x ♣ x

North	East	South	West
-	-	-	1♥1
2♣	2♦2	Pass	3♦
Pass	Pass	3♠3	Pass
4♠	Pass	Pass	Pass

1. Playing super light 8-11
2. Natural and forcing; nice wee psyche.
3. Very long hesitation - nearly talked them out of it.

Here's a 3NT play problem from that first abandoned set, you get the 9♠ lead and the T♠ holds:

♠ A K J 2 ♥ J T 8 5 3 ♦ 9 ♣ J 9 4		♠ T 8 3 ♥ A ♦ K 8 6 4 2 ♣ A K 8 3

Just goes to show, there is always a upside to staying in bed!

Here's a thought though. Say you worked out the datum in the open room and scored each pair against it. That would give you an objective measure of how each pair performed. If you then scored likewise in the closed room could you simply award the team the combination of the pairs result?

For example our NS score +28 and our EW -9 for a team score of +19. Playing against a team who only manged +15, similarly evaluated, could we claim a 16-14 victory?