Victory Points
by Jeremy Dhondy

The WBF have had a committee considering how these might change and they have made a proposal to apply in international events from the start of 2013. It is likely the L&E and Tournament Committee will consider these possibly with a view to implementing them for next season. The text from the bulletin in Lille follows:

Change in the victory points scales

A Scoring Committee was set up by the WBF President in January of this year. The committee was chaired by Ernesto d’Orsi of Brazil and co-chaired by Max Bavin (UK).

Other Committee members are Henry Bethe (USA) Bart Bramley (USA), Peter Buchen (Aus) and Maurizio de Sacco (IT).

After deep and long analysis, the committee proposed — and the WBF Executive Committee accepted — the following:

1. The adoption of a 20-point victory point scale with the following features:

• The scales are continuous and given to two decimal places
• Subject to a cap, each IMP margin translates to a specific VP award
• Each additional IMP in the winner’s margin is worth no more than the previous one
• Relative to the current WBF scales, the “blitz” mar-gins in the new scale will be approximately equivalent to the 25-2 in the old scales. There is no reduction of VPs for the loser when the margin exceeds the blitz margin.

2. It is recommended that the new scales be used in the next World Bridge Championship (including Youth tournaments) and be available to all NBOs by the end of 2012.

3. Also, the Committee will prepare new “discrete” scales (whole numbers) to be used by NBOs if they wish to during the transition from the old to the new VP scales.

4. On the World Bridge Federation website (www.worldbridge.org), the Committee will publish the “continuous” and “discrete” scales for the most-used number of boards per match and will publish them together with instructions on how to deter-mine VP scales for other sizes of matches. Also on the website, using the actual algorithm, users will be able to enter the number of boards and the preferred scale type to read, print or download the result.

5. Future work by the Committee will include consideration of aggregate score, the IMP scale and match-point scoring, although not necessarily with a view to suggest changes.