The source of customer dissatisfaction is the perceived lack of uniformity in responses to slow play and other irregularities. No one is complaining about being replaced by a robot after 30 seconds in an express game. It is simply a rule of play in express games and it is uniformly enforced for everyone. Slow play is dealt with the same way every time for every player. Compare this to a speedball game. Slow play will be addressed only if another player calls attention to it. It may be addressed after 15 seconds or two minutes depending on who is playing. In the case where a director tries to deal with slow play, there are a variety of possible outcomes: a player may be encouraged to play in tempo; a player may be warned that they will be replaced for slow play; a player may be temporarily or permanently replaced by a substitute. Whenever a table exceeds its allotted 14 minutes per round, an adjusted result is assigned. Note that the penalty for slow play assessed in live play at a club or tournament, i.e., a procedural penalty, is never assessed. Although the adjusted results may be uniformly determined, there is a widespread perception that there is a lack of uniformity in assigned results. Sometimes GIB projections are used, sometimes they are not, and other times still different methods are used. Further, it makes no difference if slow play is the result of poor connections, difficult hands, rudeness, or deliberate delay. This only adds to the perceived inequity of treatment for non-offending players. For offenses resulting from different causes, there are several possible outcomes. This is the root of nearly all customer dissatisfaction. There is a secondary effect that degrades the quality of games for customers. In a live game, there are only a handful of director calls in an entire session. There are often dozens of director calls every round in BBO's ACBL tournaments. It appears that BBO is undermining the value and authority of directors by encouraging an unreasonable and incredible degree of director intervention. In any business, unreasonable expectations result in good employees leaving and poor employees staying. If management turns good employees into poor ones, ultimately customers are adversely affected. A benefit to BBO of reducing the number of director calls to a level comparable to live play is that the number of directors per session could be reduced. Director compensation and corporate profitability could both benefit from eliminating demands on directors for correcting slow play. The quality of director performance should increase when their efforts are directed to problems that require human insight and decisions, not mechanical problems that are solved by computer applications (Customers already benefit from the elimination of common problems in live bridge like bidding or play out of turn, misdeals, and revokes.) The solution is to deal with every instance of slow play equally, and it is already available to BBO. In speedball games, players should be replaced after a fixed period of lack of response (such as 20-40 seconds) by a robot. Trying to replace with human substitutes simply takes too long and creates more variability in the ability and play of replacements. Furthermore, it is very difficult to find players willing to substitute at the end of a tournament. Perhaps players who were replaced by robots could reenter a tournament at the conclusion of a board or round; experimenting to find an optimal result seems like a reasonable idea. Players should be assessed uniform procedural penalties for unfinished boards in a round. There should be no negotiating or litigating adjusted boards with directors, which is time consuming and distasteful -- and completely unnecessary. The consequences of slow play should be the same for everyone all the time, and they should be at least mildly unpleasant if they are to be effective. BBO and its ACBL tournaments provide a wonderful service for customers, and all any of us are looking for is a fair deal.
