mrdct

Not true. In many countries HUM systems are played at national championships, at state championships and even at major club competitions. HUM systems live-on despite the WBF's efforts to stiffle them. To a large extent, HUM systems are not allowed in "top World events" anyway. They aren't allowed in the World Youth Teams and are only allowed in the Bermuda Bowl in the knockout stages.

So there you have it! Unless you were actually at the table (or at least get the facts straight from the horse's mouth) you are on very shakey ground as to what the full story was which Justin has now kindly elucidated for us all. I was lucky enough to operate for a couple of matches involving the Poles and I fully concur with Justin's assessment of them. At the end of the Canada-Poland match, Gavin Wolpert (who was screenmates with Konrad Araszkiewicz) told his opponents what nice guys they were to play against and how much enjoyed the match. The whole event, and similar to other youth championships that I've been involved with both as a player and official, has been played with a very high level of sportsmanship.

Don't necessarily believe the tempos that you see on BBO. Good operators generally enter bids as the tray passes under the screen so it will often look like North and South and consuming all the time in the bidding and that West and East choose their bids without thought. Also, the auction provides operators with a moment or two to "tune-out" or attend to other matters such as getting a coffee, checking a player's scorecard, checking a record sheet or just going for a stroll. Accordingly, a break in tempo on BBO will often just be the operator doing something else briefly. As has already been pointed out, there was no ruling or appeal on the board so obviously none of the people who were actually at the table had any problem.

While we're adding extra vugraph features, how about an FAQ button that generates a pop-up with links to: - official event website; - BBO vugraph schedule; - realtime scores; - webcam; and - other (operator configurable). This would save the commentators having to announce the various links at regular intervals.

I can't stand auto-play singletons - whether playing or operating. When operating, it make me lose my rythym (4 clicks for each trick) and invariable results in clicking on a different card where the singleton used to be.

Australia does not used "option 1". Australia has a mixture of pre-alerts, self-alerting calls and delayed alerts in various situations. The absence of an alert does not mean the call is natural, unless screens are in use. http://www.abf.com.au/members/alertingregs.html

[hv=d=s&v=b&n=st64ha6dkj765ct63&w=s53hkjdt9832caq92&e=skj8h7432daqckj87&s=saq972hqt985d4c54]399|300|Scoring: IMP[/hv]

Today's bulletin reports that the semi final result of 133-128 in favour of Ekeblad over Jacobs is pending an appeal. Does anyone know the hand or the outcome?

I think non-English commentary at one table when two-table coverage is being undertaken is a fantastic, and perhaps a necessary, service to bridge fans. However the BBO software isn't particularly well suited for it in several ways. As Roland points out, organising the non-English commentators can be quite a hassle and on the few occassions I've had to do, I've pretty much blindly ungagged any player with a country flag from the country involved. That worked reasonably well in terms of getting a reasonable flow of commentary in the closed room in the desired non-English language, but the downside was we had a dozen or so commentators that possibly weren't up to the usual standards of the "official panel" floating around other vugraph matches after those matches had finished. The software features I would like are: 1. Multiple chat channels that users can select from. These would include the "official BBO commentary in English", "free-for-all unrestricted kibitzer comments" and "non-English commentary". Indeed, users could choose which commentary they want and could even watch more than one at once. It could be user selectable through "ignore chat" options - i.e. add extra check-boxes for "ignore official commentary", "ignore free-for-all commentary" and "ignore non-english commentary". The advantage of this approach would be that dual-language coverage could be provided for a match with single-table coverage. 2. Operators to have an open to derestrict spectator chat at their table only. This would probably be quite easy to implement and if, for example, Polish commentary is planned for a closed room in a match, the operator can simply derestrict spectator chat and periodically announce that comments in Polish are welcomed and others should keep quite or watch the other room.

One thing that really annoys me is that every time I install a new version of BBO, my settings as to colours, sounds, ignore chat, display filters, friends logging-in notification, etc. all return to their defaults. Obviously the way I like things is best and should be adopted by everyone as the default! If that wont be possible, at least can we retain our personalisation settings through software upgrades?

Don't under-estimate the importance of a good stable internet connection. Cooperative event organisers is pretty handy also to get access to the hand data files, etc. Above all, I think fairly detailed planning well before an event is the key to ensure that all of the infrastructure is right and that you have enough competent operators to do the job.

I assume that when you set GIB to play faster, it will generally play worse as it hasn't had time to fully calculate all of the possible eventualities. Is all the GIB processing done centrally on the BBO server? Maybe some sort of distributed computing model could be used to share the GIB processing amongst the machines of the human players at the table. I would like to be able to get four GIB players playing against eachother. Even better would be to run five or six tables of GIB players against eachother at varying speeds to produce a datum. I also assume that GIB has no way telling what system its opponents are playing which kind of makes it a bit unfair. Perhaps when a GIB player is at the table results will only be meaningful if everyone is playing SAYC.

I assume GIB makes all of its decisions on a single-dummy basis and doesn't "peek" at other players' cards. One thing I have noticed is that GIB is really slow. I think that if it were to become a pay-for-use service, some more meaty computer processing power will need to be dedicated to GIB to have it play more in tempo.

GIB doesn't alert its conventional bids. I know you can click on a GIB bid and get an explanation, but it's not the same and not compliant with the laws of bridge.

I wonder if any thought has been given to covering the Bermuda Bowl in Estoril in a few short months from now?

The first daily bulletin indicates that there is an onsite vugraph show, but it doesn't appear to be run on the Swan software. I'm looking forward to seeing how the European teams that have qualified for Sydney fare. Interestingly, Israel (one of the Sydney qualifiers) got pumped by Sweden (who haven't qualified) in the first round.

The easy solution would be for the "Tournament Rules" button to be greyed-out when no such rules have been uploaded. Then players would know that there are rules to be read rather that clicking on what is most often a dead link.

Vugraph of pairs events is problematic for all parties concerned (players, spectators, operators and organisers). From the spectators' perspective, the quality of the viewing experience is somewhat limited by the lack of comparitive scores and the endless waiting around between rounds. A really nice software feature that I would like to see for pairs events would be an indicative comparitive result on a board, perhaps generated by getting 10 tables of "Jack" (world computer bridge champion) playing against themselves. In terms of streamlining the movement, instead of using a Howell movement, run a movement that has 3 stationary pairs (obviously at least 2 of the stationary pairs will need to be different each session so that everyone plays eachother). It would probably take a fair bit of work by the CTD to design the appropriate movement and prepare guide cards. I don't buy the argument that playing with screens slows things down. A couple of years after introducing screens at my local bridge club, most players were quite comfortable with their use and there was virtually no discernable difference between the speed of play at tables with screens and the tables without screens (such as in an event with screen being played in knockout matches whilst a swiss repechage continues without screens - but matches/segments of the same length). What does happen is that when players are playing in a super-important event (such as the Open Pairs Final at Tenerife) they slow themselves down a bit anyway.

This morning's BBO vugraph match from the PABF Championships had Chinese commentary in the closed room which seemed to be a great success. I believe it is now planned to have closed room coverage with Chinese commentary for the rest of the event which will be great for all of our Chinese fans. To view the Chinese characters, you need to change your language in "tools" to Chinese.

The ones available on my machine are: LH Michael; LH Michelle; and Microsoft Sam. I'm using Windows XP Professional will all the recent updates and service packs. If you do a google search, I think you can load all sort of different voices onto your machine, including voices without an Amercian accent.

You can change the gender and speed of the voice in Windows XP under Control Panel -> Speech -> Text to Speech.

For Wildman tourneys, we use a properly licensed version of DealmasterPro to prepare the hand records and that software is acknowledged on the hand records. I don't think I've played in any bridge club or bridge event in Australia in the last five years that didn't provide hand records with Deep Finesse analysis. Even my local two-sessions-a-week club in country Victoria provides hand records with Deep Finesse analysis.

Hand records with Deep Finesse analysis are currently made available to all players via a website (www.bridgeshop.com.au/wildman.htm) for Wildman tournaments; which are generally run on weekdays at around 12:30 pm CET (8:30 pm AEST) and whenever I feel like it on weekends!

I've been wondering whether or not there would be any merit in running tournaments on a "payment is optional" basis whereby players can still play for free, but would be asked to make a small contribution to the TD's retirement fund if they felt they got a good hour of entertainment out of a tourney. Players who have paid, say, US$1 could get a dollar sign next to their name as they move around the tournament which may encourage others to give. Also, players who have paid could receive enhanced services. The functionality I envisage is that when setting up the tournament the TD would specify an "entry fee" but tick a box that the fee is optional. There would then be other boxes to tick to select the enhanced services that people who have paid will receive. Enhanced services could include: - hand-records with Deep Finesse analysis; - personal score-sheets; - masterpoints; - BBO points; and - participation in a cash prize pool.

Thanks for the reply Claus, but what I am really looking for is something that the BBO vugraph audience can simply click-on after the link is mentioned in the official commentary that will take them straight to a chat channel in their java-enabled web browser where all they need to do is enter a temporary name and away they go. The chat window will also need to be resizable so that the BBO windown can still be seen. It may need to be hosted on an external site somewhere and would need to be capable of having up to 500 people or so (possibly more) in the channel at one time. I wonder if the BBO Poland people might be interested in putting this sort functionality up on their website during the World Youth Teams Championship, given that Poland must be one of the favourites and will surely be receiving quite a bit of BBO coverage.