criptik

So you're saying this happens automatically for every tournament and I as director do not have to do anything special to get it to happen? I agree the director should go back and check things, it's just nice to get things started automatically (in particular when there were very few tricks left in the play).

I have played in some clocked tournaments which seem to get a very quick (within seconds) score adjustment when a board does not complete. Usually the adjusted score is very accurate and I can't imagine the director has time to do this manually in that time. Is there an option for this to happen in some non-manual way?

I have played in some clocked tournaments where say the last board of a round is not completed so and average is assigned to both sides, but then within a few seconds I see a message such as "Board 8 has been adjusted to 3NT +1". Since it happens quicker than the director could have handled it, is there some automatic adjustment going on here? And how would I turn on such adjustment when I run a clocked tournament?

The extra "directors" you add, do they have to be registered as directors at BBO or can they be any BBO member? If they have to be registered as directors, is BBO allowing new directors to be registered at this time? So if you have multiple directors, does only one of them need to be present when the tournament starts and it does not have to be the host who created the tournament?

We have a small group and I believe I am the only one in the group with the ability to create free tournaments. Sometimes I am unable to play in a particular tournament. Is it possible to create a tournament and have one of the other players run it? Does that person have to have any special privileges?

What is the quickest way for a playing director to see all the incomplete Boards at the end of a clocked free tournament?

Would still like to understand how the system decides who to schedule next in an unclocked tournament. As mentioned previously, I have not seen any repeats when we have 4 tables, and there are times when people have to wait 15 minutes. For example 3 rounds in, the 4 pairs A,B,C,D have all played each other and E,F,G,H are still playing, the system will always wait (no matter how long) for one of E,F,G or H to finish rather than have A,B,C, or D repeat. This is good, as we would rather wait and avoid playing the same pair twice. The problem is that the above logic does not seem to hold with 5 or more tables.

We finished a small tournament today #39871 (Mar 2), and everything seemed to go fine and we even got the result summary page when the tournament ended. But seem unable to get the full results and hand records, travellers, etc. Could someone explain?

OK next time we have 5 or more tables (which sadly is not very often) I will give clocked a try.

In my original post on this topic I said in my experience with unclocked movements with Rounds = TotalPairs - 1, I had not seen anyone play the same pair twice. But that experience was with 3 or 4 tables. I have since seen that with 5 or more tables, you can indeed play the same pair more than once. Is there a reason it works well with 4 tables but not with 5? Does the system generally try to avoid playing the same pair more than once, but revert to replaying under some conditions? If so, what are those conditions?

Yes, I believe that was the tournament. As I recall, we started with 3-1/2 tables but I was able to sub the pair that didn't get in for the sitout. On a different topic, are these logs that you mention something that any director can view?

How does one know whether one has the right to run howell movements?

On a small tournament (4 tables) I had set up +allavail+ but still when the tournament started one pre-registered pair did not get in (I personallly don't know what their connection status was at the start time). Is there some situation where +allavail+ should not work?

This was a free tournament, but maybe they don't check for that.

A player in my tournament today had paid for a robot as a partner but then his regular partner (i.e., wife) came home and he wanted me to sub her in but the substitution never worked. Is that by design?

The other day in a small (4-table) unclocked tournament with 3 boards per round, one of our tables used too much time on the first 2 boards and so did not get to play the third board. However, in this particular case they also had to wait 10 or so minutes for their next opponent. Q: is there any setting which if they have to wait would allow them to start the third board and perhaps end it with an average if they don't finish it before their next opponents are ready?

Some of my players have asked about keyboard bidding. Some BBO help pages describe that if keyboard bidding/play is enabled, being able to type bids like "1N" in the chat window and having them automatically recognized as bids rather than chat. But it doesn't seem to happen these days. Are these help pages just out of date?

In a recent small tournament I was the single director and registered to play with X. The tournament started and during the first round I learned that player Y had logged in and wanted to play with X. So I wanted to replace myself with Y (and thus become a non-playing director) but when I brought up the "Show Tables" table and right clicked on my name there were no replacement options shown. Is there any way to accomplish this self-replacement?

I recently created a tournament that was meant to be private but I forgot to check "Use Custom List". I could edit the tournament to correct that but before I noticed the error, a pair not on our custom list had already registered. Is there a way to remove that specific pair before the tournament starts? I tried sending them a chat message but got no answer. I ended up cancelling the tournament and re-creating it but would be nice not to have to do this.

The clock does get used in Unclocked but only to the extent that the final board must be started before the clock gets down to 3 minutes. But once a board is started, it will be allowed to finish no matter how long it takes. I have directed 30 or so very small tournaments (3-5 tables) all unclocked, and I will add that if I set NumRounds = 2*NumTables - 1, I always seem to get a nice Howell like movement where every pair plays every other pair exactly once. But I don't know if this is guaranteed. As for when the move can occur, I do not have access to the source files, but in my experience, the system needs your next round opponent to be ready (may be selected dynamically based on who you have not played yet and who is finished with this round), and also your current opponent's next round opponent to be ready.

It's a very low priority request but it would sometimes be nice for the humans to distinguish the robot pairs in the travellers.

Occasionally we have had situations where there is more than one robot pair in our small unclocked tournaments. (One to fill a sitout, and one to fill humans who had to leave early). It seems to work fine, but a few questions: When you look at a traveller that has a robot pair in a tournament with 2 robot pairs, is there any way to distinguish which robot pair you are looking at? In our howell-like movement, eventually the robot pairs have to play each other. I've noticed the completion times for each board in such a robots vs. robots round is the same, so the hands essentially take zero time to play (and of course the robots then wait a good while for some human player to finish). I assume this is normal? When two robot pairs sit the same direction in a round (say as declarer), it looks like they don't always play the same cards in the same situation. Is this normal?

Our group prefers unclocked because they don't want to have a board terminated with an average in the middle of a board or even with a very few tricks left to play. (And the director does not want to have to go in and assign fair results to such boards). As I mentioned we have had no problems with the movements over the many tournaments we've had, i.e. assuming the number of rounds is set up properly, everyone always plays everyone else and no one plays the same pair twice. So I'm not sure what the advantage would be of an official clocked howell movement. I also believe the total tournament time can be less with unclocked (but not by much).

I have directed 40 or so small free tournaments (3-5 tables), all have been unclocked. I always set the number of rounds to 2*T-1 to allow each pair to play every other pair (so for example 7 rounds with 4 tables). As far as I can tell, no one has ever played the same pair twice in a tournament which is great. Often pairs have to wait for a table that is still playing to finish, which is fine. My question is what are the requirements to allow a pair move to the next round? For example assume 3 tables with round 1 having A playing B, C playing D, E playing F. In the next round assume the system wants the pairing A-C, B-E, D-F. Now let's assume A-B and C-D finish their first round but E-F is still playing. Will A-C be allowed to start their second round without waiting for E-F to finish? Or do both A and B have to be able to move before the move occurs, so A in effect ends up waiting for E-F to finish? Asking because whenever I've been waiting for a table to finish, my opponents also seem to have to wait, have not seen a case where one pair gets moved and the other keeps waiting. And thus when there are only 3 tables it appears that everyone moves at the same time. With 4 or more tables I definitely see cases where some tables move and others are still in the last round which makes sense, but just trying to understand what are the requirements for the move to happen? A related 4-table question would be: one table is finishing round N, everyone else is finished. Obviously 2 pairs have to wait for the last round N table to finish before moving to round N+1, but will the other 4 pairs always be allowed to start round N+1 earlier? Also given that the system (thankfully) avoids having pairs play twice if at all possible, does it start with a predetermined movement schedule or is the movement "computed on the fly" as pairs finish the early rounds?

OK thanks for the quick response. I will follow up from here.