Ability

Masterpoints as a Measure of Ability

Suppose I go to an unfamiliar bridge club. I have the problem that I don't know how good anyone is. In the bidding, it is useful to know how much the opponents can be trusted to bid well. In the play, it is useful to know the reliability of inferences based on their bidding and play. In this situation, I would love to know everyone's total masterpoints. It would be very useful to know that one player has 3000 masterpoints and another player has 2. The player with 2 could be better than the player with 3000, but that is very unlikely.

The point of this story is that total masterpoints is a reasonable measure of ability, and it can even be useful as a measure of ability. It's not perfect, or excellent, or great. But it is reasonably good, and much better than nothing.

But people do not often use total masterpoints to judge ability. First, masterpoint totals are not easily known. I can't use them at the unfamiliar club because I don't know them.

At my local club, I know the masterpoint totals of some people. But I still do not use that information to judge their ability. I am no fool. Masterpoints are too much influenced by how often a player has played. I judge them by how well they do at the table. I would guess that not one person at my local club judges me by how many masterpoints I have.

So, for the most part, people do not use masterpoints to judge ability. The only exception is when they know a player's masterpoint totals and do not know anything else about the player. I am puzzled by the prevalence of the notion that masterpoints are used to measure bridge ability.