Bridge Points Circuit: A spectacular launch and a host of enhancements!
The Bridge Points Circuit has been available on Funbridge since 1 November. By playing these tournaments, you can earn Bridge Points and climb up the world rankings! The Bridge Points Circuit tournaments attracted 9,817 players in November. Well done to all the participants!
Bridge Points rankings for November
Dutch bridge player 🥇 Roelof van Lopik did particularly well with 7,457 Bridge Points accumulated in November, followed by our ambassador 🥈 Dominique Fonteneau aka domineau (4,863 BP – France) and 🥉 Teng-Yuan Liang aka Fat Orange (4,286 – Taiwan). Congratulations!
Roelof van Lopik
Bridge Points Monthly Ranking Winner – November 2024
Congratulations to the winners of November’s major events
The two most lucrative tournaments on the Bridge Points Circuit in November gathered thousands of players. At the end of these hotly contested events, two top bridge players did particularly well:
A word from the Funbridge team about the future of the Bridge Points Circuit
The first month of competition comes to an end and Roelof van Lopik is crowned champion. On 31 December, we will crown two new champions: the winner of the December monthly rankings and the winner of the 2024 annual rankings (a year that will only have included 2 months of competition). Every point counts towards a place in one of these two rankings!
The live rankings have a different purpose from the monthly and annual rankings: they have been designed to reflect the global hierarchy of online bridge in real time. To do this, we take into account tournaments played over the last 365 rolling days. Our objective is twofold: to enable you to join the largest online bridge rankings and to see the best players in the world dominate. However, we quickly realised that the players at the top of the live rankings were certainly very talented, but above all had to impose a frantic pace on themselves in order to keep their place. And that is not what we want.
That is why, from the first week of the competition, we took the important step of stopping instant tournaments. They were an excessive way of accumulating points, rewarding regular attendance rather than performance. After this first month of observation, we are going one step further: in early 2025, the live rankings will be modified to take into account only the 25 best results of each player over the last 365 rolling days. This change will ensure fairer competition, by giving less available players a chance, while rewarding great performances in major tournaments.”
Boris Plays – Funbridge Product Manager
What do you think about the Bridge Points Circuit?
What do you think of this first month of the Bridge Points Circuit and the developments made? The comments section of this article belongs to you and we read each of your contributions!
All about the Bridge Points Circuit in video
Included in the Premium+ subscription!
In addition to many other advantages (unlimited deals, exclusive features and content, discounts all year round, etc.), Premium+ subscribers can take part in Bridge Points tournaments on Funbridge without spending any Diamonds.
What did you think of the first month of the Bridge Points Circuit?
Share your opinion with the community and the Funbridge team in the Comments section below.
I agree with the idea that rankings should reflect skill rather that volume. But the suggested “live” ranking, using just the top 25 results, has the disadvantage of ignorring all other results (so it might encourage more extreme risky plays (because bad tournament results don’t count) ). An inprovement might be: averaging ALL results (but only for those players with a minimum of X participations (possibly “penalizing” missing results)). Using an average instead of a total will still reflect skill over volume but will not ignore any results.
I would suggest to use averages for the monthly and anual rankings too.
Of course the 200/500 etc. tournaments should get a modified (x2/x5) weight in the averaging.
Thanks Yoram, very interesting point. It’s true that only taking the top 25 results into account could encourage players to take more risks and therefore gamble on abnormal results in order to rank well. Here is why I don’t think it will be a problem (I could be wrong, time will tell):
1) BP500 and BP1000 tournaments, which pay 5x and 10x more points are quite rare (2 per month on average). Playing very aggressively in these tournaments would be a bad idea because a poor performance means losing one of the rare opportunities to score a lot of points. The balance of benefits and risks is not in favour of playing too aggressively. What’s more, the highest-rewarding tournaments have a lot of deals, so a deliberately risky strategy is even less likely to succeed. I agree that this kind of strategy works well in Express Tournaments, since there are only 6 deals to play. But these are BP100s only.
2) Ignoring bad results is, in my opinion, not a bad idea. Using the average over ALL tournaments illustrates performance, of course, but I want to allow for accidents along the way. Although it’s rare, sometimes a player starts a tournament and can’t finish it. In that case his result is obviously extremely bad and we must not penalise him for that. Some of our tournaments (particularly the knockout tournaments) require a lot of commitment and it is acceptable that sometimes even the best players have to withdraw. This rule of the 25 best tournaments was inspired by the ATP Circuit (tennis), which introduced it to avoid penalising players who get injured.
Our philosophy is ‘test and learn’, which is why we are making this change while keeping a close eye on the results it will produce. As much as I think we’re on the right track, I’m not 100% sure that 25 tournaments is the right number. Maybe it’s 50? I think we’ll soon see.
Your contribution to the debate is much appreciated in any case, thank you!
Thanks Boris for your reply. I quite agreee with your point that the tendency to play “risky” in the important tournaments is lower. I also agree that averaging all tournaments has the drawback of unfinished tournaments.
My main point though is that a relatively low number of tournaments simply does not reflect the general skill of a player, but more of a “special skill” of sometimes achieving spectacular results.
Maybe a good compromise will be to average ~90% of all tournaments, so unfinished tournaments and some a small number of the worst ones will not count.
Anyway, happy to see you are open to comments and strive to improve.
Nice words and a good decision to only take the best 25 results into consideration for the live ranking.
Thank you king. Our conversations have contributed to this decision, and it’s to your credit that you were one of the first to propose this solution, even though it will obviously cost you your throne.
Sono d’accordo con Aviram1. Prendere in considerazione solo i 25 migliori risultati incoraggia a modalità di gioco estreme, portando a licite e giocate azzardate che falseranno ancora di più i risultati.
Ho scritto una risposta al commento di Aviram, che spero vi aiuti a capire il nostro punto di vista.
Agree with Aviram1. Also the calculation of levels needs to be modified – else sooner or later everyone will get to 60. I would propose annual subtraction of n% from your BP. 10%-20%, not sure about exact value, requires modeling. Though the levels will not be downgraded – if you ever got to 50 you can’t be 49.
Hello Timour! I’ve written a response to Aviram’s comment, which explains why I fully understand his point and at the same time why I don’t think it will be a problem. I hope it clarifies it for you too.
About the levels: they only reward assiduity and seniority. They allow people who will never be able to take a high spot in a ranking to win something they can be proud of. Inspiration comes from the ACBL. As you probably know, being an ACBL Life Master is obviously a great achievement, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect the level of the player. In fact, that’s why there’s no ranking by level – it’s just a personal award to be proud of. Yes, one day level 60 will be full of people. Although we have no plans to create a new title beyond ‘World Grand Master’, why not continue to add levels up to 70, 80… The points thresholds to be reached are already ready if need be.
What do you think?
Looks great