Thoughts on the World Championship book

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages.

A couple of years ago at the Shanghai Bermuda Bowl, Brian Senior invited me to write as much of the Round Robin section for the Open and Women’s as I desired. What a nice invitation!

It set me on a path of thinking, before I went, about the nature and function of the World Championship books. Once upon a time they were the most exciting repository of information available to the bridge world. Every card and bid of the WC final, dispassionate, merely telling the tale, not embellishing it in any way. One was able to come to one’s one conclusion about what had happened.

Is there still a role for the WC book to be like this? Now, when we have on the Internet every bid and play recorded. Now, too, when we have lavish Daily Bulletins, again fixed on the Internet for posterity.

It seemed to me, that the part of the book I was writing was best off avoiding what was already going to be available online. Therefore the first thing I did was watch no matches that were going to be Vu-graphed. I also wanted to avoid writing up hands which were already reported in the Daily Bulletins. In other words to make this value for money by giving the reader new material, or, if you like, to record for posterity things that otherwise would be left unknown.

In line with this idea, I decided to follow some teams which I thought would have the potential to do really well, but wouldn’t be considered especially exciting vu-graph material.

Ireland because they’d had that great result of 2nd in the European recently. Could they keep it up?
Argentina because any team with Lambardi on it has to be a chance. Honestly, if Pablo was playing with three tinned fish I’d still be expecting him to get up.
Indonesia because they are so frustratingly close to pulling off the big one, but does anybody really expect them to? And they are my friends and neighbours.
Australia because I’m completely parochial.

Okay. Now you sit, you watch, you collect data which will tell a story. Its story.

One of the things that happened in this tournament was that Ireland and Australia both had dreadful starts. So after a few rounds I sat down to watch these two teams play each other and I guess I was already expecting what the story would be. Ireland finally gets its act together by trouncing Australia and then steadily moves up the ranks to take its rightful place, whilst Australia languishes sadly at the bottom of the field.

But the data, of course, is what’s telling the story. What happened in fact was that Australia emerged easy victors and it was Ireland that was never in the hunt. Australia had a splendid qualifying, staying in the top few throughout. Meanwhile, Indonesia was never convincing and Pablo struggled.

The data was telling a story and the story that was developing seems to be looking at the hardest question in sport to answer: why do teams lose? A harder question, even, it seems to me to answer than why do they win?

Argentina, Indonesia, Ireland are all teams that might easily do well and yet why was this the two weeks when things were tough for them, when their luck was never in?

I didn’t do a good job, in the end, of presenting this story. Partly this was because the copy that went into the WC book was, due to some sort of communication failure, not the copy that should have been there. It was incomplete and badly proofread.

Still, the fact is that it is a hard topic to write about. Yet I hope it was also a fascinating one which is rarely if ever preserved, since it is so much easier to write about the winner.

If anybody reading this has ideas on what the WC book should look like these days, opinions more than welcome!