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.

Let me give you an occasional TD's perspective: 1. Unlike a ftf game, sitting at a table waiting for the movement to be called does not give much opportunity for socializing. As a result, it's painful. 2. I wrestled with this problem a lot in my early TD days. You set the clock low, people play the clock when they see they're in a bad board, that leads to adjustments, which take time you may not have. You set the clock high and the tournament draggggggggs along. 3. My answer may seem counter-intuitive but here's what I did: i. I turned the clock OFF. ii. I set the timer for 6 minutes a board. iii. I ensure all my tournaments have no more than 3 rounds. 3 rounds of 3 or three rounds of 4, that's it. What happens is these tournaments actually run FASTER than timed tournaments. Here's how it works, I've got 10 tables and that's about their speed. Tables 1 and 2 finish, whammo, they switch tables and move on to round 2. Everybody else is playing round 1. Then tables 3 and 4 finish, and off they zoom. Each table as it finishes, only has to wait until another table finishes and off they go to the next round. Finally only the slowest two tables remain, now this is typically more a product of disconnects than actual play but anyway, off they go. Now everyone is in Round 2 and the field has been "seeded" by "speed of play" rather than score. The fast guys are playing other fast guys. The slow guys are playing slow guys. In Round 2 if you go from fast to slow, maybe the third round you're in a slightly slower group, or maybe you were the fourth table to finish round 1 but are the 2nd to finish round 2, so you move up into the fastest group. The cheetahs blow through the boards like a hurricane, no waiting. I've see them finish Board 9 before some people started Board 6 pretty regularly. OK, so what's left: 2 things. One is the 6 minute timer, even in an unclocked tourney, will auto-pull a board if you don't get to it in time. You have for example 18 minute to get 3 boards in. If you get to Board 3 with 4 minutes left, fine. The clock will go negative, reminding you to speed up, but it won't pull the board you're playing. You absolutely cannot avoid a bad score through slow play, a tactic which is the bane of the clocked tournament and the suspicion of which causes apprehension and tension between players. If you start a board, you'll finish it. Period. But if get to the third board and the timer says you have 2 minutes, whoops, what's this? The computer auto-pulls the board and assigns an average (not ave minus, just average) and this tends to catch you up with the group, as you're soon off to the next round. Now we get to the end of the tourney and we're waiting painfully for the last 5 tables to finish. And I have an answer to that, too. I now reset the timer to 4 minutes. Which typically means the last board for them gets pulled, there's no way they can get to it in time. They auto-average the last board, people aren't sitting around forever watching the turtles play, and the people that lost the last board? Well, they were too slow and here's the final key point: they knew this would happen going in, because I announced it in the rules of the tourney. This creates a "culture of play" in which you play at the speed you are comfortable. It's not a race, the vast majority of players don't have a board pulled. But it's advertised as a fast tournament and if you don't meet that description well either accept you play one board fewer or find another tournament. My latest tourney (today) 3 rounds x 3 Boards each: Start: +3 first Board finished by fastest table +7 2nd board finished by fastest table +9 first board finished by slowest table +10 2 tables finish Board 3 (one of them passed it out). They could now start an 8 minute wait in clocked tourney. Instead, they immediately begin the next round. + 17 Fastest Tables finish Board 5. No, I'm not making this up. +18 2nd board finished by slowest table. The system now tries valiantly to get them back into the flow by pulling Board 3, averaging it, and they too are now off to Round 2, actually 1 minute ahead of some others. +19 Everyone is in Round 2. (Boards 4 to 6) +32 Slowest table finishes Board 5. System skips Board 6 for them throws them into Round 3 (board 7), 6 minutes ahead of the last group to finish Board 6. +37 Everyone is in Round 3 now. Oh, except for the (get this) 4 tables who have already finished the tournament. One of them did it 5 minutes ago. That's right, 9 boards played in 32 minutes. These people now have 21 minutes they can vacuum the flat, read a book, or play somewhere else. By rights, they should take a minute of their time and say a prayer for my continued good health. + 53 Last tables finishes Board 9, tournament ends. 29 tables x 9 Boards = 261 Boards Played. Boards auto-averaged by the system: 3 , or 1.2% (I just chose this tourney as the last one I TD'ed, so this may be lower than usual because even though I pulled the timer down in the last round, they all made it through Board 9 - in part because the 3 most likely to be slow had received those earlier boosts at Board 3 or 6.). I set the tourney parameters such that 3 boards which would have been played by the slowest of 29 tables didn't get played. 52 teams played 9 boards and 6 played only 8. No-one played 7. The slowest of the tables managed 9 boards in 53 minutes, in other words less than 6 minutes a board. Nobody ran the clock to avoid a bad result, I needed to make zero clock-based adjustments. If you set the parameters like this, people can enjoy a fast game and if they fall behind, worst thing that happens is they play one fewer board, for which they take an average. :)

I think the major reason speedball dominates is that is scheduled essentially on top of the other tournament. If they were spaced an hour apart they wouldn't be competing for the same pool of players. I end up in speedball generally because a) it's lunch so I don't have time but more often :lol: when I check the regular, it has 1 entry, and when I check speedball starting a few minutes later, it already has 8. So I go with the larger field.

That's in lieu of an assigned adjusted score. IMO, to use this law, or to award average to both sides instead of determining degree of fault, out of laziness (admitted or otherwise) is dereliction of the TD's duty to rule in accordance with the laws (see Laws 81B2 and 82A). IMO, duplicate bridge ought to be serious enough that players and TDs expect to adhere to the rules. If folks want a more relaxed game, let 'em play in the rubber room. (Pun intended. :) ) Love the pun. I think your post touches on the heart of the question: what's the standard? If I find fault on both sides (they should have alerted, but they should have asked - taking your point those aren't equal faults) does ave = pop up as an option? Or is 51-49% fault sufficient to trigger A+-? If it is, I think most missed alerts end up in Ave +- territory, barring the more proper action of a substituted score. Because to me those other factors (experience etc) might provide a context for adjustment, but in terms of fault, the primary fault will always lie with the missed alert. That's the thing that started us down the wrong path, even if the opponents had the last "clear chance to avoid the accident", if I may borrow that phrase. This is where I lose my way, because my reading of the laws doesn't call me to do this sort of "quantum of guilt" calculation in the primary case - absent actions which are "malicious". I should be clear that I am confessing laziness, not excusing or advocating for it. Likewise, I am pleading time constraints and informality of tournament as mitigating circumstances - not defenses. So in summary 1) Yes I feel I should conduct a proper examination, rather than slip into Ave = as a cop-out, but 2) I am not sure that I understand on an instinctive level the degree of fault necessary to trigger ave +-. To my way of thinking, it stands out as a case where the fault is larger than technical, or the damage to the other side is clear but difficult to quantify with any confidence. But I am interested in the guidance of others as to the 2nd point particularly.

It is. Perhaps, "often fairer to the field than letting the board stand" is a better way to say it. I don't claim to be a clever man. Sometimes in a ftf game, I need to actually think about the adjustment for a couple of minutes. I've got lots of questions to ask myself, in terms of UI, level of players, differences in the contract, differences in the lead, what line of play could be taken, whether there's "agreement", whether there's damage, the afore-mentioned "did one side fail to play bridge", the afore-mentioned "is that in fact an inverted minor raise or it a (mis)judged invitational raise", the afore-mentioned "could/should the non-offending side have been reasonably expected to take action to protect/better inform themselves"? I've got more questions I could ask, but what I'm trying to do is restore the score for the hand to what it would have been had the infraction not taken place. In a ftf game, I have more time, i can often work it through. Even then, sometimes, it's controversial. You do get cases where your ruling is idiosyncratic (if the guy playing north had been sitting south, I'd rule one way, but since he wasn't, it goes another way - not because of like/dislike, but because of level of experience/skill). Online? Again, compared to ftf, I'm shooting into the dark, unless I hilariously choose to believe people who describe themselves as "experts" and "world-class". I know some players want/expect/demand that what I should do is punish the offending side. They have a quick and easy answer: these guys did something wrong, so we get a top (or more often, an ave +). But that, to my understanding, is not what I'm supposed to do - and part of the reason it's not is that throwing ave +/- s around distorts the results for the field. And I'm lazy. So here comes the ave =, and let's go on about our day. I take jilly's point, which is that I should by rights insist dogmatically that proper bridge be played at all times, and my rulings should do likewise. When I am lax, I do my players (or the game) no favours in the long run. Mea culpa. Maybe I am part of the problem as much as part of the solution. But I hope not. Also, I do note that for some people, the stakes in this game are not so high, they just want to enjoy themselves and that's it. Else how can you explain ghoulash? Personally, I'd rather play parcheesi than ghoulash, it's like listening to "The Chipmunks Sing The Songs of Leonard Cohen". But the people in ghoulash seem to be having a good time, so who am I to judge? (I do judge, mind you, oh how I judge). Vive la difference.

I agree, this has been a very helpful thread. My own view is that the raise must be weak because holding that hand and bidding 3C, there's no way I want partner to be thinking about bidding again, unless he's holding a just barely sub 2C opener. That's my standard. Fred's right, of course, and reminds me that you should be a little more systematic and detailed in your explanation while you conduct your inquiries/make your ruling. But here's the rub: time. In a face to face game, yes, you do occasionally get the director calls backed up, but it's rare - and you have time. You can do the "let's go for a walk" thing where you take a player away from the table, ask him to show you his hand, ask what he thought the bid meant, what he would have bid had he known, etc. I appreciate that you can do that in private chat online as well BUT in ftf it does not slow the tourney. First of all, in ftf play, people don't leave. I've seen it happen four times, 2 were medical emergencies, one was a ahem partnership misunderstanding, and the last one was pretty funny, the players were new and asked "that's it, then?" on the penultimate round, the opponents thought they were asking is this round over, and said yes. The new guys were asking was that the end of the last round, they left, lol. In online play, when you're TDing, sub calls are pretty much a constant buzzing sound. Don't tell me to maintain a ban list for disconnects - mine has (no exaggeration) over 400 people on it. It's a race between me to ban people and the universe who keeps coming up with more people who disconnect. So far the universe is winning. Ftf also has the "late play" option. BBO doesn't. In ftf, you can call the round, and hope your table with the ruling can catch up within a couple of minutes. In BBO depending on the format, the round does not move until the last table finishes (one reason why I rarely TD in Swiss or survivor formats). So online your duty to the field to keep things moving is higher. And if you don't attend to that duty, two things happen: one is disconnects, and the other is angry calls, which take more time to get off the screen. Speaking of angry calls, when you are at a table making a ruling, the other people know where you are, what you're doing, and they understand this is part of the game and there may be a delay occasioned by it. Online, they don't know these things, this makes them more likely to message you about the delay, and less likely to be tolerant of the delay. You can't call over your shoulder, "be with you in a second". If you want them to wait, you have to type that in, again taking you off the task at hand. Here's how it typically goes: Our hero TD is at table 5 trying to put humpty dumpty together again. Table 8 N: please come (brief pause) Director is requested to Table 8. (close or move pop-up) Table 8 N: we need you here (briefer pause) Table 8 N: hello? EW are talking Polish. Please come. (very tiny pause) Table 8 W: Opps not playing Table 8 S: please come to table 8 Director is requested to Table 8. (close or move pop-up) Message direct to 8N: I am at another table, please stand by. Table 8 S: table 8. Table 8 W: Why you not come? Table 8 N: (to tourney) don't bother calling the TD in this tourney, he won't come. Sub needed: Table 8E has disconnected. This is happening in-between trying to figure out Table 5 and dealing with 3 ticked off people there. The tools you have are to possibly average a later board to try and catch them up to the field. Do that, and watch the players scream bloody murder. This is again in a fun online tourney with no money on the table. What do you do? You take shortcuts. You ask them to finish play and tell them you'll look at it later. When you get a free moment, you do, and you make an adjustment. It's harder to ask questions then because the players have moved on to other hands most likely. You can't send them a group message anymore, and you haven't time to send them 4 seperate ones. You adjust, then you answer their individual outraged demands as to why you made that adjustment, try to accept their insults, and sub someone in for them when they leave in a huff. Note this happens, regardless of the merits of the case. Had an auction the other day, guy overcalled with a 6 card suit headed by KQ, and alerted it as "psychic". Opponents bailed on the auction and the guy rolled up his 2 contract making for a top. I adjusted, he asked why. I assumed he was a newbie and explained to him that a) his bid wasn't psychic and :) "psychic" is not actually a good alert explanation and c) without his action the opponents would have found their normal contract. Given the lack of experience I assumed he had, I adjusted it to Ave. (note: I know I shouldn't have, it should be A- to him, and I explained that to him, that typically in this thing I should adjust his side to an Ave minus). He disconnected. This sort of thing: unusual in the details (don't recall seeing a "psychic" alert before), not at all unusual in the course of action. So you don't always explain your ruling. You don't always ask all the questions you should/would in ftf. And sometimes I just go "good lord, I haven't time for this" and I wipe the board to an average, and we can pretend it just never happened. Is this right? No. But is easy, expeditious, and fair to the field. I'll take my abuse for it, including from this forum, and points well taken. I shouldn't do it. I try to avoid it. But it's a fun tourney, no money on the table. So sometimes I do.

rofl I was so motivated by money, I lobbied hard for uday to let me charge a dime to play in my tourneys. I did this because I had a theory that even charging a dime would lower the number of disconnects and improve the general atmosphere, plus it would allow a trickle of money into BBO - how's that for my supporting the free aspects of the culture here now? :) Got shot down because bottom line, the dime isn't worth the trouble for the guys running the site. Fair enough. For my other thoughts on the evils of pay tourneys, try any of my old posts at random, chances are about 40% I'm ranting in one of them. ;)

My thoughts: 1. Given how that went, I think the TD who banned your guy did him a favour. Let's be honest, you aren't going to want to stumble into one of his tourneys again by accident. He's helping you make sure that doesn't happen. 2. I don't know about y'all, but anytime I see the "No Psyches" as part of the rules, I think very loooong and hard about whether I want to enter such a tourney. And not because I like to psyche a lot. But because, imnhso, it speaks to a whole mindset, which i will now strawman misdescribe as "I am not interested or concerned with the actual rules of bridge. I am running this tourney according to what I think the rules should be." Well, OK, so we've now established what we're dealing with. Now I understand that some TDs ban them because they don't want to go through the hassle of dealing with people's complaints about psychics etc. I get that. However (and I admit this is personal feeling), my own approach is that since psychics are in fact allowed under the rules, they are part of the game, and I do my players no favours by allowing them some sort of protection against part of the game they don't like. With all due respect, people who don't like psychics need to suck it up, and people who want them banned need to grow up. Just one opinion. 3. I agree that the phrasing your partner used may have caused some confusion to a harried director. You have to remember that while he is chatting with you, the tournament is grinding on, he has do all the subs, other tables are calling to complain etc etc. If he misunderstands the question at the very beginning, he might say "oh brother, I haven't got time for this." And given variance in language abilities, that can happen very easily. I had a tournament the other day where a person lost conn and I subbed them and back on they came and wanted to be subbed into the game again. I try to accommodate these if I can, one problem: he was waiting in the room he wanted to sub into, kibbing - so he can see all 4 hands. So I have to wait and sub him in with no options left in his play, or (what I usually do) I ask him to go to the lobby and then I sub him in when the next board starts. I ask him to go to the lobby. I speak three languages, he speaks at least two - you guessed it, non in common. He thinks I'm insisting he leave the tournament, as if I'm mad at him. I'm private chatting with his partner in the hope she can explain it to him. Meanwhile, 3 other tables are sending me decreasingly polite messages about what's happening at their tables, and I'm doing subs (don't need to leave this table to do that). Eventually it all got done, but it was painful. Then I have to send a message to the sub thanking him for playing two boards and hoping he'll sub again (people who get disconnected and then want back in typically don't give any thought to the sub). 4. Power. Hmmm, in my own case, I started TDing because to my observation (see my past threads ad nauseum) the fact that you can play on this site for free is one of the defining advantages of this site, and I wish to support that aspect of the culture here. I began TDing as a way of "giving back" to BBO for what it gives me. My TDing varies depending on my workload, there's times I go two weeks in a row, maybe three tourneys a day each weekday. Then maybe three months goes by and I don't TD once (I'm probably not online at BBO during that time either). Once I began TDing I also saw a benefit for my classes, which is to run a series of hands, then sift through them afterwards and see if there is a particular hand which is a good teacher, or where you can see the difference between good bidding/play and bad bidding/play or occasionally inspired bidding/play. The Power Trip, to the extent is exists for me, consists of having a bunch of people I do something for free for crap all over me, complain, then fail to thank me when it's all done. I typically run tourneys of 16 to 32 tables (it's what I've found requires enough of my attention without in most cases getting to be backed up for one person). That's 64 to 128 people. I average less than one thank you per tourney, and I don't think I'm unusual. (Don't get me wrong, I don't actually care if I'm thanked, but I do note these things.) So into this context, if some twit starts giving me grief, do I enjoy booting and banning them. Your GD right I do, it feels good the same way pulling out a splinter (not the bridge kind) does, the same way if some stranger phoned you up and started insulting you, you'd hang up. Banning rude people is imnsho the duty of anyone who wants the site to be polite. And I use a pretty simple standard, which is whether I'd accept what you are saying if I was directing you in a ftf game, which typically makes the calls very very easy to make. The difference is, without the anonymity of the internet, I believe the vast majority of people I ban would never even think about saying to my face the sort of things they've written to me. When was the last time you heard someone called a c--t at the bridge table? I mean, really. 5. Here's my modified suggestion for "TD rating". The tourney ends, a little box pops up. "You've just completed a BBO tourney. How was your experience?" ( ) Outstanding ( ) Above Average ( ) Average ( ) Below Average ( ) Prefer not to Say. The question is not aimed at the TD directly, but at the "experience". You could make it more pointed if you wish. You run this for a couple of weeks, you'll probably have a good idea of who your "5 Star" TDs are and who your "1 Star" TDs are. The only thing is, people will score based on their mood, how they did in the tourney, whether the opps were rude, if the TD (rightly or wrongly) ruled in the favour, how many subs were needed (only very indirectly related to the TD skill), etc. But you will get an idea, anyway. Now if you want to take that to the next level, you start posting TD star levels (like buyer or seller ratings on Ebay), and now there's an incentive for TDs to be their best. One thing I've learned in business: you achieve what you measure. If you start measuring how good a job the TDs do, that in and of itself will improve performance - even if you do (almost) nothing else. What you don't measure, you tell people is unimportant. So they treat it like you've told them to.

I don't know if it reflects growing (misplaced) confidence in my rulings, or just altered blood sugar but whereas in the old days I used to try and reason people through these things, asking a series of telling questions, like: "what's the damage to you? "if it had been alerted, what would you have bid?" "what's the lead you would have made?" followed by "and how would that make a difference?" I have generally found those conversations weren't successful. Typically the person calling has made a bad decision and is now looking to blame the opps (I don't think that was the case here). Typically their explanations fall into two categories: 1) I can't tell you how it would have worked out better for us but I demand my A+ anyway for punitive reasons 2) Some very complicated explanation which might be technically right but I just don't see your average player deciding to take that line, barring latent extra-sensory perception. So then the thing spirals down as the person gets frustrated with my obvious stupidity. And eventually they insult me and then whammo. Some players have saved us all time but jumping right to the insult, and on this I've really become zero tolerant, because a) hey this is me you're insulting (ego), but I hope at least partially b.) disrespect for officials, particularly officials who are volunteering, really feels like a red card offense to me. I know some of the TDs suck as Directors (especially me) but bottom line, that's really not a justification for people to insult us c) my games are free and relaxed so if you're going to take an attitude, either looking for penalties for missed alerts or alternatively, sniping at the director, well really my games aren't the place for you. I know you'll be ticked when I boot you, but you'll get over it and go on with your life and be happier not having to deal with idiots like me, and I'll do likewise only substituting the words "jerks like you" for "idiots like me". d) (childish) it is satisfying to have someone readying for a big long snark at you, and have the power to just go, "you know what? not today" and just escort them to the lobby and mark them enemy so they can rant to everyone else but you can go back to running your tourney.

Just so I'm clear, last I looked such "procedural penalties" existed as only a theoretical entity, the software doesn't actually give me as a TD any way to actually alter the score of just one pair. Is that still the case? I let the -150 ride for a pretty good result EW, ironically of course the only real sanction which became involved was that W decided he'd make a snarky comment aimed at me personally, and that went (kick/ban), because I don't volunteer my time to have people I don't know point out my shortcomings, I can get at home from people I love. I suspect that when he hit the lobby he was apoplectic, but the nice thing about the software is once I ban you, I can't even see the postings, so my day goes on quietly, and you get to find a TD which is more to your liking.

That question there is the key to why I didn't see any need for redress. That, and I agree that making 150 on those cards is pretty good news for EW. (I too would have started with an X in east's shoes, but hey, whatever) As far what's NS's agreement, again this is a pick-up game so I think that N knew 2D was not forcing, but past that, who knows?