2013 President’s Awards
by Matthew KiddJanuary 29, 2014
Stating he was more interested in partnerships and statistics than individuals and what the late great Victor Mollo called monster points, unit president Matthew Kidd presented a unique set of awards at the January 26th unit game based on the unit game results for 2013.
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The full set of awards given are listed below:
| Award | Result | Partnership (or Players) |
|---|---|---|
| Best Game | 72.34% | Kent Hartman and Maritha Pottenger |
| Best Partnership | 57.80% average | Ron and Mary Huffaker |
| Best Slam Partnership | 0.69 slams / session | Stephen and Jill Seagren |
| Most Improved Partnership | +2.71% average | Barbara Norman and Chuck Wilson |
| Most Consistent Partnership | σ = 3.94% | Andrew and Patricia Loh |
| Wildest Partnership | σ = 9.15% | Kent Hartman and Maritha Pottenger |
| Best Attendance | 22 of 23 games | Alice Lane, Freda Anderson, Ron and Mary Huffaker |
| Best David Partnership | +2.69% | Mac Busby and Steve Johnson |
| Best Bottom Feeding Partnership | +2.92% | Jean Scripps and Jerry Astrove |
| Best Pair-Pair Overperformance | +17.26% | Freda Anderson and Gail Dunham
against Alice Lane and Dorinda Lindvall |
Best Game is straightforward. Paul Alesu and Matthew Kidd held it briefly after winning the Logan Trophy in July with a 65.69%. But Maritha Pottenger soon captured it with a 66.67% in September in an infrequent partnership with Maribel Corredor. Elaine Chan and Mike Mezin topped that in November with a 68.91%. But no pair was likely to beat a 72.34%, and achieved as it was on the last unit game of the year, no pair even had an opportunity.
For best partnership, Ron and Mary Huffaker had a strong finish in the fourth quarter to rise from third place to a clear first place. Their fourth quarter streak included three wins (62.37%, 63.94%, 64.73%), a second place, and a sill impressive 66.92% third place in the final game of the year. Achieving a 55% average in a regular game puts a pair in roughly the top 10%. Doing nearly 3% better than that is really phenomenal.
Stephen and Jill Seagren won the Best Slam Partnership for the highest average number of slams bids and made per session. See Slam Statistics for more about this. Joel Hoersch and Marilyn Peters-Dunn also did very well in this category but just missed the minimum number of sessions to be considered.
The Most Improved Partnership compares 2013 performance against 2012 performance. Barbara Norman and Chuck Wilson perked up 2.71%. This may seem like a “small” percentage but when you try to achieve it in your own partnership, you will discover it is not small at all. Stephen and Jill Seagren and Ron and Mary Huffaker also did well in this category.
Andrew and Patricia Loh won the Most Consistent Partnership. Their low standard deviation of just 3.94% is close to the theoretical minimum observed in Partnership Variability. Rex and Sheila Latus and Bill Grant and Lynne O’Neill also do well in this category. Kent Hartman and Maritha Pottenger easily won Wildest Partnership; it is not surprising they won Best Game on an upswing. But John Lagodimos and Kathie Angione (σ = 7.11%) and Matthew Kidd and Patricia Lane (σ = 6.97%) gave chase. I think being unit president alone is a huge source of variability, significantly affecting how much energy I have by time we settle down to play.
Best Attendance is straightforward. Had this award been issued in previous years, Freda Anderson would have won it several times already. It’s ironic she was not present to collect it. But I imagine we will see her next time.
Last year, I introduced the Payoff Matrix and the examination of pair-pair interactions after factoring in differences in partnership skill, so as to evaluate over- and under-performance. The Best David Partnership and Best Bottom Feeding Partnership awards are based on those results. The Best David Partnership, named for David and Goliath, goes to the partnership which overperforms the most against the stronger half of the field. Mac Busby and Steve Johnson won this year. Since this award is cast in terms of over- and underperformance, it simultaneously implies they are not beating up as much as they should against the weaker half of the field. The Best Bottom Feeding partnerships goes to the partnership which overperforms the most against the weaker half of the field, and simultaneously underperforms against the stronger half of the field.
The Best Pair-Pair Overperformance goes to Freda Anderson and Gail Dunham who seem to “own” Alice Lane and Dorinda Lindvall, doing about 17% better on average than expected over the 17 boards they played against these opponents during the year. My advice to Alice and Dorinda is to try and sit the same direction as Freda and Gail so as not to meet them. My advice to Freda and Gail is exactly the opposite.
Cutoffs and confidence
With the exceptions of Best Game and Best Attendance, the awards are based on statistical calculations involving means or standard deviations. This immediately raises the issue of confidence. For example, Maribel Corredor and Maritha Pottenger played once last year and had a 66.67% game. George and Kathee Bessinger played twice and had a 61.62% average. Should one of these pairs have received Best Partnership instead of the Huffakers? “No, of course not,” is the instinctive reaction. But why? We know the long term distribution of percentages in a bridge pairs game. Even very strong players aren’t going to average 65% in our unit game. These results based on one or two sessions are almost certainly flukes. A result based on 22 sessions is not a fluke; the strength suggested by the observations (game results) is not identical to the ground truth but it must be pretty close, perhaps within 1%.
There are different ways to handle this issue. The easiest is to impose cutoff on the number of observations required. For the most part that is the approach I’ve take where the cutoff is to have played in at least 10 sessions. The more sophisticated approach is fold in what we know about distributions and then ask which partnership we can assign the highest likelihood of being the best partnership, the wildest partnership, or whatever. I didn’t go to this trouble here. In most cases it would have changed nothing. One case that was close was Best Slam Partnership: Stephen and Jill Seagren at 0.69 / session over 13 session vs. Joel Hoersch and Marilyn Peters-Dunn at 0.75 / session over 8 sessions. Best Pair-Pair Overperformance is also close enough that it might benefit from this approach.