In a club duplicate all your pairs play the same set of boards, thereby allowing a comparison to be made to see who played them to best advantage. Now imagine all around England (or even further afield) pairs in different clubs playing the same set of boards at the same time in a single event allowing comparison over the whole of the country. That is in essence what a Simultaneous Pairs event is – an event run concurrently at different clubs over a wider area.
Participants in Simultaneous Pairs (often abbreviated to Sim Pairs or Sims) enjoy being able to compare their results with a much bigger field – literally hundreds or thousands of other pairs – from the comfort of their local club.
Sim Pairs are not expensive to play in, and participants have the benefit of a written expert commentary afterwards, to give them some idea of what they might have done on the hands, as well as generous master point awards due to the larger number of competitors. It is exciting for players to watch the website results and see how they change as more clubs upload their files. Your members can see how they did nationally very soon after the event ... provided your club uploads its results quickly of course!
The advent of the internet, computer scoring programs and dealing machines has made the organisation and scoring of Sim Pairs events much easier. Even if you don’t have access to a dealing machine, you can arrange for the hands to be sent to the club so that someone not participating in the event can pre-deal them for you. Scoring is done afterwards with the aid of your scoring program in the usual fashion.
Clubs can run Simultaneous Pairs sessions at any time of the day although results should not be posted to club websites until after 10pm to avoid the hands being visible to players playing at other clubs later in the day. Players playing in multiple sessions on the same day will need to ensure that the sessions are not both playing the Simultaneous Pairs to avoid playing hands they have already played.