McBruce

Many players at my virtual club are having difficulty figuring out how to send chat to me after the game ends. I stay online for well over the 20 minute correction period. I flood the chat area with announcements >tournament during the last round so I would think the easiest way would be to click on one of those chats, but I don’t know what gets printed on other screens: VACB154976: Thanks for playing today, yadayadayada.... That would be obvious, click the name and type a message Tournament: Thanks for playing today, yadayadayada.... Not so much anymore, unless Tournament goes to me and not to the ACBL onboarder whose handle precedes mine alphabetically and is listed first. I’m hearing all sorts of convoluted solutions involving history but there has to be an easier way.

A local player playing from an iPad has had to withdraw with partner because for some reason, it gets to her turn in the auction and the bid box appears, but nothing works, at least nothing in the bid box. Anyone seen this before? She claims to have played some solitaire BBO games without having any trouble, only live tournaments seem not to work. It’s no fun grabbing two subs to fill a half-table and then find that you need two more because the pair with the non-working iPad knows that if they leave now, before the end of board 1, no charge. But I guess there was no way to reduce by a table and ask the four subs to withdraw.

I agree with that, good clarification. It seems an uphill battle to get those who are flocking to Virtual Club games to care about such issues, though. Most of them are so happy to just play bridge that they care little about rules or ethics or even the results. Then you get a bridge lawyer who, thanks to private chat (and ghod knows he expects the moon if a response to his fishing expedition is public), discovers that opponents are having a misunderstanding and bids as though he is bulletproof knowing that they will probably work out their own auction before thinking about doubling, and my thread title is clear. Even IRL I have a rule of thumb that says that when you get back to the desk and match the auction given to the hand record, the angriest player will be the one that is farthest from the strength his bid seems to have shown. :)

A player's RHO alerts his bid and explains it in the box. The explanation seems odd, so the player asks LHO in private whether there is an agreement. LHO gives a different answer in private and the player later claims damage, but the original explanation from RHO turns out to be correct. Do we adjust, or is the damage self-inflicted, or does it depend on the circumstances?

To be perfectly clear, the ACBL conversion from what BBO sends to Live seems to be the problem here. It is reporting the BBO percentage scores for pairs, but then computing their matchpoints based on board results, without properly factoring boards where there are artificial averages. BBO may well have it right: the formula for Neuberg does look a bit dubious. :)

Today's 0-300 game had a very amusing result, 3rd in C listed ahead of 2nd in C. Here is the link. This group had some problems getting finished on time, proving really proficient at hitting round ends in spots where key decisions were still to be made, and the sub pair was actually a quintet by the time it was over, so there were several artificial averages given. I am reminded of the infamous Murray Walker F1 quote: "the third-place car has just lapped the second-place car..." :)

I did provide a link....

A BBO ACBL Virtual Club game, translated to ACBL Live for Clubs, link here My question: who is the best C pair? 13 tables played 18 boards with a 12 top, so average is 6 * 18 : 108. Pair 8 NS and 2 EW both have 111 matchpoints, and yes, I checked the individual boards. Problem appears to be that Board 12, where there were two artificial averages, has a top of 10, not 12. ACBL is not using the formula to factor to the right top when they translate. This leads to standings where the same number of matchpoints shows as two different percentages. We should thus use the BBO percentages, not the ACBL Live matchpoints. (If it were my choice, I would certainly prefer that they post the boards here (except when the are Common Game hands that might be in play somewhere) before fixing this problem.)

In the virtual club games they have added options to avoid these. +howell+ and +roundsx+ creates a one-winner game with one stationary pair in each section (max 15 tables) while the rest rotate from 2NS to highest NS then highest EW down to 1EW, then 2NS, with the second command telling the system how many rounds to play. They've also given us a +hm18+ command for 18-board games that specifies a one-winner movement with 3-5 tables and a suitable number of boards per round: the only one with a revenge round is the 3-table game. If you stick to Mitchells you need enough tables to avoid revenge rounds, but the Howell option works well to avoid these until you have enough entries to delete the command.

The BBO one-winner movement is a Howell variant I call the volleyball movement*. NS#1 stays, other NS pair go up while EW pairs go down, highest NS becomes highest EW next, EW1 becomes NS2. Works with all tables playing the same boards at the same time, but may not be as scrupulously fair as arrow switches. Plus, with 10-15 tables (16+ splits into sections) there are several pairs that will never switch directions. That may be what happened in your game. It is a one winner game since all N-S and all E-W are not completely separated. *I call it the volleyball movement because in highschool gym class we split into six teams and played a complete round-robin this way. One team stays, others rotate.

Directing virtual ACBL games and rewriting my round one announcements. One of them says this: "Claim when the result is clear with many tricks still to play: it saves time. DON'T waste time by rejecting all claims without looking: you have no 'right' to force play to the end in hopes of a misclick." What prompted this was watching for late-finishing pairs and discovering a three-player group (three players who play regularly two at a time is what I mean here) who did this four or five times over the course of three games. Declarer would claim with winners left, an obvious claim that required no comment, and it would be rejected within 2-5 seconds. Declarer sometimes reclaimed, even with a statement, and another rejection came very quickly. After the fifth incident, with the above announcement already in the round one script and complaints from the declarer, I intervened with a stern private comment to the players involved and I have not seen them since: but our games end about 3-5 minutes quicker as more rounds are finished ahead of time. Is it possible that the new Laws, allowing play after a claim in some situations, is the problem here? All four players must agree for play to resume, but once we opened that loophole, there's no telling what that will put in some players' minds. If someone three tables away gets to play it out after a claim, the little detail that all four players must agree could easily be lost.

I don't think the request is for a board-level penalty. Rather, it is for what in ACBLscore we use the command ADJ: a simple adding or subtracting of a number of matchpoints to the overall score of a pair or multiple pairs. Enter a player name and a +/- number to add to their final score. Perhaps the system would remind the TD what top on a board is in the dialog box. It would be useful for all sorts of purposes -- I've used it to adjust artificial averages to the exact matchpoints computed by a weighted score in a two-session sectional open pairs where we had a photo finish and a difficult ruling in the final round, for example. More common would be to assign a standard penalty to a pair for a procedural penalty. You might have to use it multiple times and add adjustments together, in a rare case, but still only one extra field would be needed per entry, not per board.

To be clear, they are not really "Howell" movements, but they are just as good for online purposes. The algorithm is: split into maximum 15-table sections, then within each section, the lowest numbered NS stays while other NS pairs go up a table each round, switching to EW after being NS at the highest table, and going from lowest EW to second lowest NS at the other end. I call this the 'volleyball' movement, since I first encountered it in high school gym class when we split into six teams and played a complete round-robin using the method. Since virtual games have everyone playing the same boards at the same time, this works fine. No arrow switch is needed, but you could probably make an argument that movement balance is not optimal when you don't complete the cycle, but I think the software also distributes the best players fairly well so missing a few pairs doesn't give big advantages. Plus it is simple and fast, a plus with the system handling so many at once. In ACBL virtual 18-board games, I try to run these volleyball movements with 12, 14, 16 pairs or 32 or 34, otherwise switching to a 9-round Mitchell. (We're still under the impression that 18 boards, the minimum for full ACBL masterpoints, is the ideal number since online tournament averages before this all began were much shorter.) Actual Howell movements are a bit more complicated since they need to take into account a second dimension, that of pairs playing different boards at different times.

It does seem to take about an hour for a morning or afternoon game to be posted at ACBL Live. Sure would be nice if ACBL was able to post the deals. Maybe they cannot translate the BBO format to PBN...

No need, the question is already answered by the real masters... :)

Are you counting the time it takes to remove 32 decks of cards from the boards? With old-style metal boards I am lucky if I can average 20-25 minutes per set of 36 in a tournament week. With the Dealer4 machines dealing boards every 5.5 seconds I don't believe the people who say they can multitask and strip and load at the same time. There are rumours that the local district is finally going to spring for more boards and buy the ones that open up, so we'll see how that goes... I actually voted for scoring machines first. Duplicating machines introduce never-ending extra costs: --hand record and summary printing and web posting --cards fade and become unreadable and need to be replaced more often --the machine itself will need occasional servicing --a club with multiple games will soon find it wants to have more sets of boards, so that they can be pre-made further in advance --directors end up duplicating the boards and have to arrive much earlier to do so, something which many will not happily do for free Beyond hand records, there are other advantages of the duplicating machine. My games never see boards 28 or higher, I make two sets of 1-27 and Web movements ensure that all play the same boards unless there is a sitout. With 17+ I sometimes use the 28-36 to avoid sharing, but that can be arranged as the game begins. I don't know how much memory the scoring units have inside them, but one excellent feature would be the ability to send each scoring machine the game results when a game ends, and have a set up so that a player could use any idle scoring machine to check results and see hand records for the boards he is interested in at any time. These days memory is cheap and the machines should be able to save and display game information for at least, say, ten days. This would cut down HUGELY on the amount of paper and toner clubs go through. In addition to hand records, many ACBL players (even those who can access the results online and see what happened at EVERY table) still demand "summary" sheets with their matchpoints and results only, sometimes two copies so both partners can have one. Most people look at the four or five hands they are interested in and ignore the rest, making this basically a colossal waste of toner and paper. Of the 8-20 pages I print each game, there are usually 4-6 of them that don't make it out the door. Imagine being able to go to any idle scoring device and access results from the game just finished, or two days ago, or even last week. What would it take, maybe 1MB of cheap memory in each $120 unit to save a forest? Make it happen, BridgeMate!

Thanks for the confirmation. Congratulations to the winning team! Several years ago, before duplicating machines made their first appearance in this area, I took charge of the task of preduplicating about 3100 deals for the Canadian Championships by hand, and was also asked to handle the vugraph arrangements for the final stages of the event. With about 1000 deals still left to be duplicated upon my arrival, I was smart to find two local players who did a fine job as vugraph operators. There was a sequence of about 12 boards where I was called upon to fill in during the semifinal, and I was terrified that I would manage to give something away somehow, exactly what I had trained my assistants not to do. So I think we should commend the vugraph operator, the one person at the table who knew absolutely that finding the queen of diamonds was going to decide the match. As we waited to see if Maksymetz would indeed run the jack of diamonds, minutes went by and the operator waited without giving anything away by typing a message or some other mannerism. Not an easy task at all when a popular local win depends on the next play!

As South, white vs red at IMPs, you hold: ♠ A J 9 ♥ K 9 8 ♦ 3 ♣ Q J 9 8 5 4 You open 1♣ in second seat and LHO overcalls 1♦. Partner passes and RHO bids 1♠. You rebid 2♣ but your side passes from here to the end of the auction. LHO doubles your 2♣ rebid and RHO cuebids 3♣. LHO tries 3♥ and RHO's 3NT ends the auction. You lead the Q♣ and see this dummy: ♠ Q 5 ♥ A 5 3 2 ♦ K J T 9 8 ♣ A 6 Your hand again, with dummy on your left: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ♠ A J 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ♥ K 9 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ♦ 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ♣ Q J 9 8 5 4 Declarer wins in hand with the K♣, partner contributing the seven. Declarer leads the 4♠ to dummy's queen, partner playing the two. After some thought, the jack of diamonds is led from dummy, and partner plays the two in tempo. Declarer thinks for some time and finally plays the king. The 4♦ is the next play, and declarer rises with the ace after you discard the 4♣, next losing a diamond to partner's queen, declarer playing the three as you pitch a second small club. From partner comes the ten of clubs which declarer wins on the table with the ace. You are down to ♠AJ ♥K98 ♦-- ♣J9 and declarer has five tricks to your one. Declarer next plays off the winning diamonds to get to seven tricks. Partner follows to one and pitches the four of hearts on the second one. What is your plan for these two tricks and the ace of hearts, declarer's eighth trick, which follows? ... ... This hand was the finale of the Commonwealth Nations Bridge Championship's secondary event, the Transnational Teams, held this past week in Glasgow, Scotland. The main 28-team event was "won" by the "Chairman's team" with Wales second, Wales winning the gold medals for being the highest-placed national team in a field made up of national teams and several filler teams ineligible to win. The semifinal and quarterfinal losers joined the Transnational Teams event with eight of eleven matches remaining, and despite being only given 33 VP of a possible 60 for the three missed matches, three teams from the main event qualified for the semi-finals: Scottish President's, Canada, and Australia, along with Swiss leaders "Canadonia." Canada and Scottish President's played in the final, which came down to this hand, shown on BBO vugraph here in Vancouver (where several of the Canada and "Canadonia" players are from) Sunday morning. The closed room completed their set as the bidding happened and the score with just this board to play, Canada sitting East-West, was 65-60 to Scotttish President's. The closed room result on this board was 1♠ +1, 110 to East-West. The match result thus depended on the success of the 3NT contract. [hv=pc=n&s=saj9hk98d3cqj9854&w=sq5ha532dkjt98ca6&n=s862hqt74dq762ct7&e=skt743hj6da54ck32&d=e&v=e&b=22&a=p1c1dp1s2cdp3cp3hp3nppp]399|300[/hv] The Q♣ was lead and Bryan Maksymetz won in hand with the king, and led a spade to dummy's queen. A short break followed and the vugraph showed the jack of diamonds led to trick three, but when North, Liz McGowan, followed low smoothly, a minute later Maksymetz chose the normal play of winning and trying the finesse the other way. When Sam Punch showed out, the vugraph operator reported that Maksymetz was apologizing to partner Daniel Korbel, who agreed with the play. Hey, we're Canadians, that's what we do. But it was not quite over. Maksymetz won the K♦ in dummy and led another to North, and the club return put Maksymetz in dummy to cash the rest of the suit for seven tricks. The ace of hearts followed, and, according to the vugraph, all followed low. Big mistake. Do you see it? Commentator Barnet Shenkin, who did a fine job all day, commented that this was 'mis defence' because the following heart from dummy endplayed South into giving up the ninth trick by leading away from his spades. But the next vugraph events, nearly simultaneous, were a claim of 8 tricks by East (at least, that was what was entered), and a note from the vugraph operator that "the Scottish President is polishing up his speech." Nothing more was broadcast from either table. You can view the board at the Vugraph Archive, where it is called "2014 TNT Glasgow - F2_2" and the board in question was Board 22 (23 and 24 having been played first at the open table). What actually happened? Did Sam Punch find the unblock of the king of hearts (risking the match if the positions of the jack and queen of hearts were swapped) and the vugraph operator made an error? (Perhaps Maksymetz's hand with the Q♥ instead of the J♥ is a likely opener, but are you risking the contract on that view?) Or did Maksymetz claim eight tricks from a position where he in fact had nine on an endplay? I'm guessing there was an unblock here (and if so I say bravo! with great enthusiasm) and a vugraph error and a quick retirement to the party, but some confirmation would be helpful. Anyone know?

Two keys to running a large game with not quite enough BridgeMates, or other scoring units: 1. Learn how to enter contracts/declarer/results into the BridgeMate software (not difficult once you get the hang of it). Be sure you know how to enter passouts, doubles, redoubles, and artificial scores. You should be familiar with this from previous games when there are scoring errors, but there are still people out there who only make the score change in the scoring program and don't change the scoring unit data. This leads to fun when the web results say 4♥ + 1, 620 and 12 players phone to ask why. 2. Unless you are training for a long-distance run, make sure the tables using pickups are the ones closest to the scoring table.

Why not simply set up your 17 table Web and play with the player who arrived late, and when you have a moment try to call the player who left? Splitting into two sections is so 20th century... :)

Three decades of hopeless/clueless comments for you: It must be about 30 years ago that I remember reading in our local newsletter about an auction at a tournament that began 1♥ - pass - 4♦. Opener was asked about the meaning of 4♦ and was having trouble remembering the name of the convention. "It's, um, uh, can't recall what it's called, um, oh yes, it's a SPINGLETON!" Opponents quickly pointed out that on this auction she was in fact playing a related convention called DINGLETONS. It must be 20 years ago* that I had the following 3 board round against the type of married couple for whom strategy consists of driving 50 miles to play at the club where the entry fee is a dollar cheaper: Board 1, I play four spades and have four apparent losers, but trumps break 3-1, the player with the singleton following to the second but not to the first. +420. Board 2, the uncontested bidding begins with Mrs. RHO and goes 1♣ - 1♠, 2♣ - 2♥, 3♣ - 3♦, 4♣ - pass. I lead a trump from my doubleton and dummy has a singleton. Partner discards and I don't believe even on this auction that declarer has ten clubs, so I ask if he is out of clubs. The Director is called even before partner produces a club. "You can do that?" says declarer. Certainly, says the director. Dummy now pipes up with "why didn't you do that on the first hand then?", deftly accusing partner of failing to do something she was unaware was possible. Board 3, with two tops in the bank, starts with my 3♣ preempt. Mr. LHO passes and Mrs. RHO bids 3♦. Unfortunately, this happens ten seconds after partner has raised to 4♣. Trying our best to avoid a freakout, we courteously summon the director over (for the third time), who begins to explain options but is interrupted by Mrs. RHO, who says she has heard all this before and will simply change her call to 4NT. After the director explains the effect of this ploy, we cash seven clubs and an ace and leave quietly. It must be about 10 years ago that an occasional partner decided RKC was the way to go. Playing at a club where defenders holding Yarboroughs just HAVE TO KNOW, a player asked me about partner's 5♠ response as we RKC'd our way to a spade slam. I answered that 5♠ "shows two key cards in spades," then placed a card from my hand face down on the table, pointed to it, and continued: "and in addition to the two key-cards he has, for some reason, partner also claims to hold THIS card." Partner immediately reinspected his hand. Why? Don't ask me. And just last week, opponents conducted this uncontested auction: 2NT - 3♥(transfer), 3♠ - 4NT. Opener now stared at partner for a full minute, then convulsively grabbed a green card and slapped it down. Responder was mortified, but opener got in the first verbal shot: "ya can't do that to ask for aces. 4NT is quantitative." When the bickering stopped, he made ten tricks for a cold bottom by making a claim on a cross-ruff, forgetting that he had emphatically parked in 4NT. His spade holding was ♠KJx within a minimum 20 count for the 2NT opener, so he was more interested in passing to get the argument started, than in bidding 5♠, as his own system demanded! *in fact, 20 years ago may be within the short period that the ACBL banned defenders from asking about each others revokes

I should like to add a sub-item: 4a) Shuffling own cards several dozen times or more, while TD is waiting to move board to next or sharing table... :)

Law 86 C. Substitute Board The Director shall not exercise his Law 6 authority to order one board redealt when the final result of a match without that board could be known to a contestant. Instead, he awards an adjusted score. A multi-team contest has several sets of preduplicated boards; players begin with two boards and get successive boards from a central table until they have played all of the boards in the set. At the end of a round before a long break, after teams have met to compare, boards 9 and 10 in one set are found to have been misduplicated. There is time to add one or two substitute boards at each table to allow all teams to have played the same number of boards, instead of awarding both sides average-plus and slightly inflating the VP economy. But Law 86C seems to make a perhaps-needless distinction between one, and more than one, redeal: --a team which has played different versions of ONE board clearly cannot add a substitute board into a match once the score with one to go is known, since Law 86C clearly prohibits this. --a team which has played different versions of TWO boards could make the argument that the wording of Law 86C does not prohibit TWO redeals, even though the score with all but two boards compared is known. I dubiously suppose a TD could decide that the Introduction's final sentence "unless the context clearly dictates otherwise, the singular includes the plural" applies here. But how far do you go? If there is a major accident in the preduplicating room and there are many misboards, are we going to have a bunch of matches scored as 14-10, 17-6, 12-12, on a 20 VP scale because some teams chose a specific colour?

I posted the preamble at our club with the heading "Members of the 'Alertable Police' should note that..." The notice was taken down a few days later by another Director who is in fact the Chief Constable on the force...

A player makes a free 3H bid vulnerable in a competitive auction after partner's very long pass. There is no question that pass is a logical and obvious alternative. Bidding with this hand is shocking for this level of player. As a direct result of this call, the offenders get to 4H vul and the non-offenders bid 4S. Defenders get off to the best lead against 4S and get two ruffs to beat it three tricks undoubled. TD adjusts to 2S down 1, still a poor score for the non-offenders as most do not find the lead that gets the ruffs. TD also chooses to give the offenders a PP of 1/4 board because the offending player's call was obviously based on the hesitation. Other than Law 90, does any other Law allow this specifically?