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?

Thanks. ACBL did a Zoom meeting on Swiss Teams earlier this week for Virtual Club TDs, and the following day I saw a few tried with not too many takers. It would seem that the best way is to get players interested by plugging the game for a week or two first, learn as much as you can about the difficulties they may face, and be available to help in the registration period. So all of this info is helping.

If a pairs player loses connection just at gametime (and +allavail+ keeps it open but the TD gives up after a minute or two), accommodating them when the disconnected player returns is possible but only if there is a half-table. If this happens in a Swiss to a player who is set to play on a team, will the system now match the team’s other pair with another unmatched pair?

There is no end to the frustration of people who feel that they have lost potential masterpoints because a robot made a good play against them, or worse, did something unbelievably bad against the pair that finished 0.03% better than them. Not a hassle this Virtual Club director wants. Not at all.

The error mentioned in the original post may not be the only error involved here, but I haven’t looked closely enough to check. I do look through all of a player’s actions compare to the timestamp of the previous action when considering adding a judgment that one side is at fault for the delay, and I distrust the totals. Often a hand that took 8 minutes to play will have a total of over 11 minutes in the summary lines. I think perhaps a second problem may be that if it is South’s turn and East asks North to explain his 2NT call, time ticks on both South and North simultaneously. The software should - perhaps as an option - follow the Laws and restrict players to asking questions when it is their turn, because some players ask about silly obvious things in order to confuse.

A few suggestions for the general tournament sub list: --when a TD tries to get a sub with Sub...Any, the invites should not go to people on the ignore list of the TD. --TDs should be able to click a box when inviting, to add to the invite that the original player may return, or probably will not be back --people signing up for the general sub list should first see a dialog box asking for reasonable behavior as a sub: no leaving after two bad boards because partner made a mistake or two, or throwing boards with wild bids because you are frustrated --TDs should be able to report sub misbehavior easily and records should be kept --players who are frequently reported should be warned or prevented from joining the sub list It's great that we have this list, and most players are good subs that play to the end and have success or fun or sometimes both. But there is a minority who are looking for masterpoints and will leave to try somewhere else the second it becomes impossible. These folks don't even bother to offer up a fake excuse, they just ask to be subbed and a quick look at their results or at table history reveals quite often that the mistakes they think their partner is making are actually their fault. It's time consuming to invite people one by one to avoid getting someone on your blacklist who has already proven that they will leave at the first bad result. If we could click a half-dozen buttons to report a bad sub, and BBO limited itself to the worst cases before investigating, that wouldn't be too much work and would improve things considerably.

Glad someone looked closely and figured it out. I can confirm that this is the problem after looking at a few tables following a five-minute extended round. The dealer on the first board always is charged for the extra time stretching back into the previous round. The logic should be time since last action OR start of round, whichever is smaller. Other than that, the feature is valuable and often allows TDs to shoot down people with very itchy pause triggers who tell you that a BIT was at least five minutes when it turns out to be 17 seconds...

I watch CNN a fair bit and it is usually the channel that I have tuned on my TV when I turn it on. But I have noticed that there is a very high likelyhood that when I turn the TV on and it is on CNN that it will be showing an ad. Other channels seem to have a far lower batting average in this stat. Similarly, when directing, there are players in every group that always seem to be the ones everyone is waiting for when you take a tour through the virtual room, whether bidding or playing or most often the confused declarer last to finish with 6 top tricks and 4 to go and not sure how to proceed. After a while you can look at the list of entrants and see these 'CNN players' before the game even starts. :)

Looking for answers to polling questions before you comment on the ruling I made: Online Virtual ACBL game, matchpoints, your side is vulnerable: ♠ KT ♥ QT953 ♦ K96 ♣ 654 Partner opens 1♣ in second seat and RHO overcalls 3♠. You choose double and LHO passes. Partner continues with 4♦ and RHO passes. You now bid 4♥ and LHO passes. Partner bids 4NT and RHO passes. What calls do you consider? If 4NT followed a significant tempo break, what would that suggest? ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Partner had ♠ A3 ♥ A7 ♦ AT85 ♣ AKT82. The break before 4NT was over 90 seconds according to table history, with no intervening chat or questions. 4NT was the final contract, making ten tricks with opening leader holding a club void and Jxx of hearts along with his J98xxxx of spades. The pair objected to my ruling that responding to Blackwood was a LA and holding four aces the 4NT bidder would continue, getting them to six. They did not dispute that 4NT was ace-asking, only that the player in question had the right to use judgment and pass even after the forever tempo break. I ruled 6NT-2 which cost them about half a board and moved them from 2nd O/A to 6th, about 0.90 silver points less. This happened on the penultimate deal of the tournament and I was unable to poll as I normally would in the 20 minutes we are given before results become final (actually, I used much of the time to ask people if they thought there was a possibility that 4NT might not be ace-asking in that sequence, which turned out to be a non-issue). You can confirm my guesses as to the results of that poll by giving opinions on the poll questions above as well as the ruling itself.

Subs from the general sub list tend not to misbehave or leave unexpectedly if you: --thank them in table chat for helping out --thank them publicly in your opening announcements --let them know if they enter in the middle of the game whether you expect the original player to return soon --mark the ones who do not behave or leave after poor results with 'ignore' so they show up in black in the list next time --use select sub, not any sub, to avoid the ignoramuses --in ACBL Virtual Club land, use the BBO Web Portal tool (ask your onboarder for the link) to check for masterpoints in limited games before selecting a sub This all takes extra time (especially the last) but usually results in good subs who stay to the end.

I'm directing too many games and watching too much bad bridge these days, but one thing I would like to see is: Autoplay Singletons: make it known that the software will insert a RANDOM delay of 0.7-2 seconds before playing -- nobody wants to select this if it is a shotgun play that screams singleton. Once this is done, make it mandatory for players with 'confirm plays' on to use it. They're already slow enough in clicking twice to confirm their no-option plays. Trick 13 should not take a half-minute to play, ever.