tciacio

That would be the people who answer e-mail for rulings@acbl.org. It surprised me too. I agree with your impression about Duplicate Decisions, but they were quite specific. If you want, I'll be glad to sift through my old e-mail and see if I kept it.

Last year the rulings group at ACBL cited Duplicate Decisions, page 40, as the published regulation and stated it was binding at the club level. Of course, they don't link to it on the Charts, Rules and Regulations web page.

My guess is these were boards 5 and 6 from an additional set made up for the same session. Vulnerability and dealer repeat in a 16-board pattern. When extra boards are needed in a crunch, often handwritten labels are slapped on a board that is 16 or 32 lower. They should have been shuffled before their first play.

Thanks for that. I had not seen that particular one before. Neat solution, but, personally, it seems a rather large difference to call it a mere variation. The example you gave of a 19-table movement seems to me like a 13-table Mitchell with a 6-table Web grafted on on the high end. I think we agree on the concepts, but I am a bit uncomfortable still calling it a Web or minor variation.

Actually, a Bowman is special case of a Super Bowman, rather than a Web movement. Web movements are structurally quite different. I run them several times a month. The Bowman-Ewings essentially add two appendix-tables to a base movement and use whatever number of boards the base movement would. In comparison, Web movements split the field down the middle, and use a fixed number of boards (typically 26 or 27) no matter what the size. A Bowman for 12 tables would be based on a 10-table segment and a 2-table segment. The Web movement for 12 tables would have two 6-table segments. Bowmans will follow the same skip, if any, that the base movement has, but Web movements for 26 or 27 boards will not have a skip. In addition, Web movements are designed for an even number of tables. If you want a Web for an odd number of tables, you would end up using the Web movement for one table less then adding a rover and displacement table to it - not pretty. Half tables can always be accommodated by rounding up or down to an even number of tables and using a phantom or a rover. In the U.S., ACBLscore can handle phantoms, but has no clue about rovers in a Web movement. You need external movements files for those for the rover movements. Tom