The Instant Matchpoint Game

The finals are in progress in São Paulo (third set of six). USA 2 is battling Italy in the Bermuda Bowl, but currently with a fair lead - oops - Italy surged ahead in the second set and it is they who have the lead. In the Venice cup, the Chinese women are comfortably leading USA. In the Seniors, Poland has a commanding lead over England.

Kim and I took the opportunity of a free Wednesday evening to play in the Instant Matchpoint Game at the Winchester club. In turn that enabled us to eat at one of our favorite places, Punjab in Arlington center. The food was good as always. But, OMG, the traffic was bad. We were both 30 minutes late for our date!

The way the IMP game works (not to be confused with International matchpoints) is that each board has a set score (out of 100) for each of the probable, and many of the not-so-probable, outcomes. This allows you to see immediately how your result was. Supposedly, the matchpoints are based on about a thousand results from the table at some unknown previous event. But they were certainly bizarre. Given that the setter, Larry Cohen in this case, has significant discretion to "correct" odd happenings from previous plays, you'd expect, or at least hope, that the absolute par on a board would score somewhere around 50, unless it's a very lucky layout or requires double-dummy play or defense. But very often the par score was far from 50. A case in point: on board 25, par is NS -600 (E/W can make 3NT or 5C) for which the unlucky N/S pair would receive 23. Our score was -100 yet, for that, we got only 63! What would have to happen for us to get a really good score?

On the whole, we didn't play particularly well and ended up fractionally below average. Nevertheless, we received 1.28 masterpoints! A strange world, indeed.