Source: Warren Buffett Cup
The Warren Buffett Cup 2012: September 10th to 13th 2012 in Omaha, Nebraska.
The Warren Buffett Cup revives the challenge match idea. In the 1930s, the first great heyday of bridge, transatlantic matches between the best players in the United States and Europe were a regular feature of the day. Matches such as that between the American showman Ely Culbertson and Colonel ‘Pops’ Beasley, held in London in 1933, attracted huge crowds and routinely featured on the front pages of the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. Since then bridge has moved on to become an international game which millions of players around the world play for fun and thousands more play competitively in international tournaments.
The Warren Buffett Cup marks a return to the head-to-head challenge match format that so excited audience in the 1930s. The players use a simple bidding system in which all bids must be easily explicable to a non-expert audience. No bidding screens are employed. The emphasis is on matchplay with each member of the two teams playing against their counterparts in a variety of match formats: an individual contest, pairs and teams of four.
Format: Team Europe & Team USA
Each team has twelve players and a non-playing captain, as in the Ryder Cup golf match. For the bridge, nobody sits out so there are always six tables in play: three with Europe sitting North-South (E1-3) and three with USA North-South (U1-3). There are three separate events: Pairs, Teams, and Individual. The running score now stands at 2 to 1 in favour of the Americans.
Bridge Base Online
The Buffett Cup is broadcast live on Bridge Base Online, which provides an opportunity for spectators to follow the action in all of the matches as they happen.