English Bridge Union
Stratified events are a way of encouraging less experienced players by rewarding them for doing well in competition with other players of similar experience. They are played and scored just like ordinary duplicates with the difference that they are designed to produce more than one set of winners. The facility for EBU-affiliated clubs to run stratified events has now been made available. Stratification is quite easy to implement. Why not try it out at your club?
In a stratified event there is no change to the way the duplicate itself is played. Your players all play against each other in your usual movement. It is simply that the field is divided by the club into two or three (or even four) strata - the more tables there are, the higher the number of strata you could have. A pair’s stratum is determined by the Masterpoint Rank of the player with the higher rank. The scoring program then calculates the overall results exactly as normal – the A field, which includes everyone. It then removes all the pairs in the top stratum and calculates another set of results for the B field, which includes only second stratum pairs and below. If you have a third stratum, it then removes all the second stratum pairs, too, and calculates a third set of results for the C field of third stratum players. Thus a winner is computed for each stratum and appropriate Master Points are awarded.
All the club has to do is upgrade to a stratification-capable version of its scoring program – ScoreBridge already has this facility and others will doubtless follow – and set the stratification levels, e.g. for three strata this could be Open, below Star Master and below County Master. The scoring program does the rest. Overall there will be more winners and more Master Points for club members – all at no extra cost. Less experienced players will still be testing themselves against the stronger players in the club, but they will also have a separate competition against their peers at the same time.
Further information can be found here
