McBruce

We have a team league on Tuesday Evenings where players set up the team matches from a schedule and standings page posted on my website. It would seem we are not the only one. As we transition back to live bridge, some may wish to continue playing these team games online and some may wish to play at the club. If multiple matches are played at the club, we usually have them share a set or multiple sets of boards. It would be good to have the online players use the same boards at the same time, but as I understand it this requires that the match creators be given a file which contains the deals in a fairly readable format, which is prone to accusations of cheating: even if I post the file on my website for download minutes before the start, someone could conceivably copy it into a reader and get the deals while playing. I wonder if there is a way around this where a deals file can be encrypted by BBO so that the deals file can be distributed to match arrangers without the possibility for revealing the deals (or the suspicion of such when results go the other way). It would be a nice option for team leagues.

From time to time when directing tournaments I get a message from someone saying that their partner cannot chat, cannot alert, or cannot do something occasionally required. From the conversations that ensue I think most of these problems stem from people accidentally adjusting portions of their screen and not knowing how to undo the adjustment, which seems to be saved from session to session. I'm almost certain from some of these that there are snowflakes players who have deliberately pulled the gray bar separating the cards from the chat down to the bottom because messages are 'distracting,' but others do this accidentally, especially on smaller screens and cannot get back. My suggestion is that a button, maybe within the Help area, to return to a normal setup if things go horribly wrong, might help.

Directing today's Virtual Club game and for the first time, the 'Show Tables' box is exhibiting some strange behavior: --resizing is far more difficult, only able to be done at the lower right corner and only resizes the height, not the width (edit: it resizes the width but limits it so that on my screen I can expand the width to include the table number column and about 3.5 players) --the box remains on top of everything else, even over option lists when the tournament in 'Running Tournaments' is clicked Our game yesterday did not get enough pairs, so this may be a change that began yesterday, but this was not happening on Tuesday the 16th. I'm using Windows 11 but that has not been an issue until now. Logging off and on did not fix the issue.

Just about time for the last round of a 0-300 game, and one straggler table is still playing. I go and check and see this: [hv=pc=n&s=sh9dtcqj&w=shakdk7c&n=sh65d8c6&e=shq3d5c8]399|300|West, declarer in 2NT, has 6 tricks in and is on lead to trick 10.[/hv] A full minute passes and they have about 90 seconds left. I'm about to assume that West has the same intermittent net problems I have been having and claim the rest when West springs back to life and plays the 7♦ to go one down, compressing four winners into one. West took a full minute, possibly more, to carefully consider this play and the 7♦ was the answer that was chosen. "Nice try, partner" is the first comment. I blame gold points.

A club director here in Vancouver told me she had an entry buyer requesting "an East-West near the washroom, please." :) I told her my response would have been "only planning to go in round one?" :)

L73E2: If the Director determines that an innocent player has drawn a false inference from a question, remark, manner, tempo or the like, of an opponent who has no demonstrable bridge reason for the action, and who could have been aware, at the time of the action, that it could work to his benefit, the Director shall award an adjusted score. The first argument is that the commenter clearly has a demonstrable bridge reason for making the comment: he would like to have enough time to play all the boards. The second argument is that a private message is not something envisioned by this Law, and gives no UI to partner as a ‘question’, a ‘remark’, a ‘manner’ or a ‘tempo’ might. This makes it different than the four examples mentioned and thus logically removes ‘the like’ from consideration. The third argument is that a player who is playing out winners with no reasonable expectation of having the opponents discard the cards that will win a remaining trick, and doing so very slowly, is certainly not an ‘innocent player’. L74B4 says so. So does L74C7. The fourth argument is that even if you decide that the commenter has broken L73E2 or L74C3 or L73D2, in a FIFA squeeze case, adjusting the score requires that you adjust to what the likely result was going to be. Nobody’s getting a penalty trick here. If you insist on pointing out that the commenter has transgressed, to be fair you need to point out that prolonging play when the only hope is an obviously unintended misclick or three is also against the rules.

There’s a question: why can’t you? It’s not a false statement. You’re 100% not discarding the A♣! If a FIFA-squeezer called the TD to complain that he had claimed all-but-one because RHO had private messaged him with “I’m not discarding the A♣” and it turned out that LHO had it, I would pretty much need LHO to admit that he forgot aces were high or something to adjust. :)

In the ACBL, the old remedies like showing declarer a card you intend to keep or even suggesting that the hand is an open book are potentially subject to Zero Tolerance if the FIFA Squeezer’s enjoyment of the game is impaired by common sense, another reason Law 44 H cannot be added soon enough…. :)

Only directing online bridge, where we are always watching the last table when everyone else is done, would reveal this flaw in the Laws that can be repaired with a simple addition to Law 44: Law 44 H: When a declarer plays to the end without claiming and wins three or more consecutive tricks ending on trick twelve, leaving a position where the card led to trick thirteen can be won by either defender, declarer's trick twelve is awarded to the opponents for timewasting. In another piece, I called this the FIFA squeeze, because of the way it resembles the final stages of any international football match where one side (or both sides) has the result it needs. Here is an actual example from a Virtual Game: Dummy: ♠ void ♥ AKJ85 ♦ J8642 ♣ 854 Declarer: ♠ AKQJ6543 ♥ Q ♦ T53 ♣ A Declarer opened 4♠, played there, and got a trump lead. By overtaking the queen of hearts declarer gets three hearts, a club, and eight spades. Can you make all the tricks for an even better matchpoint score? Many players thought so. Over and over again I saw people pull trumps, cash the ace of clubs, pitch two diamonds on the hearts after overtaking, and then when the outstanding seven hearts failed to break 3-3, they ruffed a club back to hand and played out all of the spades one by one, hoping two defenders who know 100% which card declarer has left at the end, would find a way to part with three winners. The FIFA Squeeze! (Real squeezers will simply win and run nine black suit winners and see if the defender with five hearts to the ten or nine is awake. That at least is a squeeze that has a reasonable chance of success. To avoid being bitten by Law 44 H you simply claim the rest when you overtake the queen of hearts and see if the claim is contested.) In offline bridge someone usually whispers "we know what your last card is" or a defender will show declarer his winner and say "I am keeping this one," preventing the loss of several minutes. But in online bridge, every director has seen this happen and sometimes it even works when someone misclicks or the cat jumps on the keyboard or Amazon arrives with a delivery. Ghod knows if you adjust to the apparent result to keep things moving the declarer will claim that a ridiculous mistake was about to happen. Law 44 H bites back at declarers who specialize in this tactic. It might not fly for offline bridge, but if the WBF ever updates its online rules, this is a must!

New one for you: Player -> Table: "67?> ÷ NGFDWAQ" I got as far as "six or seven points, not game forcing, diamonds was a cuebid" and tried to work out the symbols in the middle Then I noticed that they hadn't started a hand yet. Then, a few seconds later: "sorry, cleaning my keyboard" :)

Not sure what we're referring to here. Sure, if there are multiple claims it is possible to run out of time as a TD trying to investigate them all, but that's pretty rare: in almost 500 Virtual Games I have not had it happen once. What I was trying to say was that as a player, 20 minutes to check your results, when the hand record for each board is available in the History tab as it finishes, is far more time to discover problems than the offline standard of 30 minutes when you need to get your results from the wall, fetch hand records, and go over them one by one at the end of the game. As a TD, virtually all of the notifications of a wrong or disputed score I get are before the game ends, and there is ample time to check the claims of the person reporting the problem. Most of the very few post-game adjustments I have made or denied are based on last-round boards or claims of something fishy, and as long as I hear about them within the first 15 minutes of the 20, there's usually enough time to settle them as well as BBO allows.

With instant hand records, if you cannot find the problem within 10 minutes of the end of the game, I think you're not looking hard enough. TDs stay online for the 20 minutes after the game even though if someone reports a problem in minute 19 it will be 50-50 whether you can look up, decide, and adjust in time. Usually everyone is gone by 10 minutes after. We don't need that dead time extended. 20 is more than sufficient online. More possibilities for adjusting (weighted scores, different scores for each side, etc.) are on every experienced online TD's wishlist.

If ACBL doesn't relent on the 11-feet (3.35m) between table centre requirement for re-opening, we may need to start charging $1 extra for N-S seats when moving table to table becomes more of a marathon, especially since many perma-N-S players will not get up to pass boards, which will be difficult to impossible with 11 feet between table centres. Otherwise, as Phil Wood used to say when his players sat 70%N-S and 30%E-W, "there will be a lot of sitouts ..." :)

Our games are 20-board BBO-Howells, ten rounds of two, unless we have fewer than eleven pairs (with 11 we add a sub to make 12). Today as gametime approached we had 11 pairs and one on the partnership desk. No problem until I got the notice that someone was offline. I messaged the partner and checked and after a few minutes decided I would have to boot the pair. However... Booting the pair would start the tournament with only 10 pairs and move it to an 18-board Howell. So I announced a short delay, added three more minutes to the start time first, then booted offline pairs (there was only one, sometimes you find out there are several), getting us back down to 10, then went back to tournament setup, changed to 3-board rounds, 7-rounds, 6 minutes per round, went back to the main screen and killed off the extra time, then clicked 'modify.' The tournament began: but 9 rounds of 2, not 7 rounds of 3. I expect my mistake was that I should have clicked modify after changing the round/time/boards parameters, then gone back in and deleted the extra time and clicked modify again. But (assuming this is the problem) an improvement would be for the system to check for parameter changes before starting the tournament. It doesn't seem intuitive for the system to start without checking for parameter changes first when the time runs out. It's #18763 if someone wants to check into it. (As usual, the player offline claims not to have been offline, which has happened before with this player. We could also use a siren to go off for people who stray to other parts of BBO that the system sees as offline....)

Well, the topic says it all. People want to discuss hands and IMP results with their partners because it's not done terribly well in the software at present. If the set of boards were uploaded to a free-for-all teaching table, by the TD or even by a player getting the hands after the game from the TD, would that help? Anyone tried it?