"We came top in the Club with 56% and on your overall score we have only got 48%"

This is a very common complaint - and we have known differences as high as 20% in the past. This is not an error in the scoring, but something that happens when you combine the scores from all the other clubs onto one result chart. Let me try to show you how it happens.

In a 6 table section the 'top' will be 10, with other scores of 8, 6, 4 and 2 with a bottom of zero. Overall, the top will be, say, 4000 with scores going down in steps of 2 to zero. A 'top' in the club will not generally score a top overall. It depends where that score fits in with the scores achieved in all the other clubs.

Consider the following board from a fictitious club heat. It is Board One from a 6 Table Mitchell (share and relay). On this board, due to the favourable position of several cards, 13 tricks are generally made in Clubs, but there is a reasonable defence to hold it to 12. 3NT should lose 5 tricks (but pair 1 East/West let it through!). 7NT doubled by Pair 4 North/South was a disaster.

As you can see, in the Club, 5 Clubs +1 is top for North/South while overall it is worth less than 50% (scoring 1960) because the most common score overall was 6 Clubs (scoring 2742) with many pairs making 13 tricks (for 3634). The East/West top with 1400 on the other hand was almost a top overall as very few North/South pairs tried 7NT (or they got away with a lesser penalty).

You will see that the two pairs scoring a top in the club (6 N/S and 2 E/W) have vastly different overall scores. This one board will make 2% difference to their overall scores and this effect, were it to be replicated over a number of boards, causes the (sometimes enormous) disparity in the scores.

All one can do to check is to make sure that the scores and pair numbers have been entered accurately. This can be done by looking at the printouts from your local club. If the organiser has used our program to score the local result, then it will be exactly the same scores and pair numbers that are uploaded to our server. Assuming that they have put them in correctly, the Overall Frequencies will show the overall scores for each score on each board, and this will show you how good your 'tops' really were!

I hope this helps clarify matters for you ...