rigour6

One suggestion I have is to do what some are doing with bidding recounts, which is use chess notation. 1C - 1H 2C? - 2H 3H - 3NT! This sort of thing helps the less expert player direct his attention to the parts of the auction which are particularly "interesting", for whatever reason. Likewise in play. I know we don't want to rip into people but a questionable play is a questionable play, and there's no insult in a question mark, heck for some plays you can even use both Q and exclamation mark.

Well, I see we're on to another topic now. So let me go off on the tangent with you: All the rage here has been to give out T-shirts. Same problem. After a while, how many bridge T-shirts do you need? Our last Regional, we supplemented the T-shirts with wine, gave people a choice. I don't know if the wine was any good, but the label certified that the owner of the wine was the winner at the Regional, etc, so it was a type of trophy, even if unopened. Great success.

lol, this would help with a conversation I have occasionally held with Muggles. Them: Oh, how did your bridge tournament go? Me: Great, actually! We won one of the events. Them: Oh, really? (showing more than polite interest) What did you win? Me: Umm, well, at tournament points you win points of a certain colour, depending on the level of the tournament. This was an x tournament, so we won y colour points. Them: (trying to stay with the tour) Oh, yes, I see. And what can you get with the points? Me: Umm....

1) The cellphone ban reminds me of the old joke about the guy who lost his wallet in the alley but was looking for it under the street lamp because "the light's better here". I am going to assume the people who went for this ban aren't idiots, and just went with this because it's less effort and they hope it sends a signal that they're working to stop cheating. 2) To avoid blowback on deposit fees, the usual (easy) answer is to charge $2, yes, and post a sign that "all funds raised to be donated to the (insert bridge or other charity here)".

Ahhh, I see we've decided to start a flame war on this one. Sorry, I didn't bring my gas. My own take is that having a regularly scheduled and well-run tournament is definite service to the BBO community, and should receive support. Since, as you know, the quality of free TDs is a regular punching bag anyway. I do not and would not go to the trouble of regularly scheduling a tournament both because a) my life doesn't work like that and :P I'm lazy (see my previous postings ad infinitum). When I do set up a free tourney, I do take a look at the board and make sure I'm not on top of someone else with a similar format. I don't HAVE to, of course, and I don't think people are suggesting I should have to. But it would be nice if I did. And I do, because it takes a minimum effort on my part (remember, lazy) to so do. Also it would be nice if I limited the size of my tourneys. Which I also do. These are things which are being suggested to be considered by other free TDs. Fair enough. Anyway, not a big deal, put a little water in your w(h)ine everyone.

Consider posting in the "Find a Partner" thread. Also, I agree with you about "special games", they tend to draw more serious players and everyone tries to play their best game, so the experience is, if slightly tenser, usually better bridge.

That's actually an interesting part. When you have an odd number of tables, it's the slowest 3 which move together, not the fastest.

It looks to me like a very standard Ekren 2♦ pre-empt. Whether one agrees that is "highly unusual" is a matter of opinion. ACBL doesn't to the best of my knowledge, but it does require the range be restricted from true Ekren, which is 3 to 10 High, to some 5 point range (I think typically just raise the floor from 3 to 5). I think the box and time constraints and typing skills are sometimes responsible, so you get people typing in "weak, both majors" or something to that equivalent, because it takes longer to go "3 to 10 high, at least 4-4 in the majors". I'm not saying that's an excuse, I agree with your action. If you're going to play Ekren, you need to recognize that it is not a particularly widely-known convention, so it behooves you to make the extra effort, not expect your opponents to. At the same time, a convention that would allow you to use it only when you're weak with 5-5 in the majors, how many ahnds would it come up? The "victim" should use some common sense. I also agree with your viewing of the results and the reason why. Pre-empts are by nature destructive, and this one worked. Which is annoying for sure but part of bridge. The not-entirely-complete explanation isn't what caused the poor result here.

I would only add a note that this was in a team knockout. That gives you more room for this sort of action, "protecting the field" doesn't really enter the picture the way it would even in a swiss team event.

For Round 1, yes. But then both pairs would end up playing a different pair for Round 2, and my guess is they'd start moving up pretty quickly after that. Then they meet again at the top, and etc.

That "shouldn't" happen, as the software should prevent it. But it's one reason why I limit these tourneys to 3 rounds. On the 2 fastest tables: 1. A v B C V D 2. A V C B v D 3. A v D B v C No duplication. Add a 4th round, and the two fastest tables must wait for at least 2 more before you can run another round without replaying the same pair. You could of course fine tune the software to wait until for example, 3 tables finish Round 1 and then send them all on together, which would avoid this problem. But such nuances are beyond the ken of mere TDs like meself.

I could definitely agree with that. I think we have to recognize, however, that masterpoints, at least as the ACBL hands them out, only very indirectly reward or measure skill. Their primary purpose is as a marketing tool for people to maintain a membership in the ACBL and an interest in continuing to play, as the act as a type of measure of progress, in the same way an odometer measures progress. As a marketing tool, masterpoints are quite successful, and for this reason I think they are a good idea. They add to enjoyment of the game, as we've all seen someone get motivated as a masterpoint milestone approaches. Masterpoint rewards for online tournaments are imnsho ridiculously high, but that's part of a larger masterpoint inflation issue, and perhaps its tempered by the fact that the points online are "colourless". But just to give an example: I was recently privileged enough to be on a team which made it to the national team championships in Montreal, and I think our record there in the final field of 14 B teams from across the country was about 50-50, we came 6th overall. 3 days of play, 13x12 board matches, $500 entry fee or some such. At the end of it all, I can't recall now, something like 4 masterpoints. For a fraction of fees and effort I dare say I should be able to generate many times that if I took three days and played in all the online tourneys I could. So in my own case, I just recognize masterpoints for what they are, a sort of bridge frequent flyer miles which say more about how experienced a bridge player than most anything else. And nothing wrong with that. The ACBL is of course aware of the "problems" their present creates in terms of ranking teams by skill, and they're working on some new system to deal with that. They will want to preserve the membership retention advantages of the present system but also create a system which reflects how well you've played in top events over the past year for example, as opposed to how often or how long you've played. This distinction is only important in terms of seeding the field for high level tournaments. As most of us don't ever play in platinum events, if those high ranking points start to have some sort of shelf-life, we'll never notice.

I apologize in advance if this posting is out-of-date. Many moons ago, we mooted the idea of a "Continuous Pairs Tourney", a sort of director-less (or director optional) tournament that never ends. As you know, when you play in the Main Bridge Club now, you can see some results for comparison and you'll get your $, but your opponents don't change. The idea of CPT was that you'd enter the tourney, play 2 or 3 boards, then there would be a Swiss style-movement. You could leave whenever you'd played as many hands as you felt like, the players themselves (via the software) would do the subs. Why would players enter such an event? 1. It demands as much or as little time as you like/have. 2. There's variety and more interaction. Instead of playing the same pair and hoping your levels work out Ok, you play three boards then on to the next. 3. Because it's a Swiss, you eventually end up playing at your level. E.g. your ongoing percentage is based on your score for the last, say 5 rounds, with all rounds you haven't played being weighted at 50%. So you enter in the middle, and say you play a 60% round. Now your score rises to 52% and you are seeded accordingly. At the end of 5 full rounds, your score is based entirely on how you did. 4. Your goal for those who are competitive is to see how low a table a number you can reach. You have a good round, you go up, but you also know, 5 rounds from now, this good round is dropping out of my average, will I hold my position then? And the lower the table you reach, of course, the tougher the opponents. It's like an ongoing game of "King of the Hill". Whatever happened to this idea? Was it ruled undesirable, was the programming too onerous, or is it simply that other things have taken priority?

If that occurs, the TD can disable players chatting to the tourney as a whole. I typically have it on and I have few problems. I warn the player that others are still playing the boards. Sometimes players are having a relaxed time and get joking around to the tourney. That's of course a different issue than them talking about the hands. Whether one likes that sort of jocularity at the table is a matter of taste, my tourneys are all relaxed, so I don't mind, but I suppose if I thought it was going too far and we were turning into a chat room with cards I can turn it off.

While I take that point, let's be realistic. What's a BIG tourney online, 12 boards? Maximum number of rounds 6. You're in a "serious" tournament with let's say 40 tables. 80 pairs. So overall, you'll play 2 boards each against 7.5% of the field. Of the 6 teams you play, they'll at best have one other pair they'll play in the round that you will also play. Probably 80% of the pairs in this "serious" tournament (too lazy to do the math) will reach the end of the tournament having played neither you nor anyone you played against. Two nights ago at my local club, I played 24 boards and at the end of the night, even with a half table sit-out, I'd played 3 boards each against 80% of the field, and the 2 teams I didn't play had played either 100% or at the very lowest 87.5% of their games against common opponents. I don't want to misuse statistics here. The real determinant of the accuracy of the results is based on the number of teams entered and the number of rounds. But you can see my point: a large online tournament of 6 rounds maximum will never reach the threshold of being statistically very accurate. As proof of that, I've won a couple. :P I'm not trying to make the case to stop holding "serious" tournaments online, nor do I want to fall into the trap of saying, well it doesn't matter if you play 7.5% of the field or in my case half that. But I'm not sure the difference justifies the much greater time of the players which a clocked tournament requires - particularly if the risk is that a very strong pair will deliberately slow their play in the hopes that will give them weaker opponents in the following round. Even if you accept the underlying hypothesis which is that the slower you play, the worse bridge player you are, can better players really help it? Are they prepared to deliberately enjoy the game less just to marginally increase their chance of winning? My guess: if there's money on the table, mmmmmmaybe. Which is of course another reason I'm no fan of how money prizes distorts the event.