The FTP UKIPT Galway Irish Bridge Masters
This past Sunday, the UKIPT Galway Festival featured the inaugural Irish Bridge Masters, sponsored by Full Tilt Poker. To be honest, we're not too familiar with bridge tournaments, so we'll reference Gareth Chantler's piece from the Full Tilt Poker Blog:
How does a bridge tournament work, you ask?
Each team of two plays every other team in the tournament once. Since this is a long process, it is broken up across multiple sessions. In the case of the Full Tilt Poker Irish Bridge Masters, there were three sessions, two yesterday and one today.
There are sessional awards for the best performers in any given session of the tournament, meant to incentivize those who are mathematically eliminated from contention to begin any given session. Of course, the trophy goes to the best aggregate score, so every trick counts.
After yesterday’s two sessions Sally Brock and Barry Myers of England were the leading tandem with a winning percentage of 65.98%. They would have to fall back to earth in the third session to relinquish their hold on the top spot. And that’s exactly what happened. Blame it on variance in the table draw or the well attended wine and cheese players’ party last night, their third session score of 55.98% was good for just 13th in the field.
Walking through that open door was Jason Hackett and Alex Hydes who had played well in the first two sessions, maintaining third place. The pair surged into first place with the best third session percentage of 67.93%, 2.5% better than overall fourth place finishers James Heneghan and Willem Mevius.
It was that consistency across sessions, third, third, and first, that netted them a healthy 64.08% aggregate, beating out Brock and Myers’ 62.65% soundly. A handsome €5,000 reward for a paltry €60 buy-in was awarded to the victors. Sally Brock and Barry Myers would have to settle for a €2,000 second place purse. Not too bad for a weekend’s work.