keeping track of time wasters

[mrdct]

I have a feeling that this issue has been raised before, but it would be useful if the BBO software could keep track of which player or partnership is consuming more than their fair share of time.

 

I think this feature would be very useful for TD's running clocked tournaments who need to assess whether to award Avg+ or Avg- based on which pair has been wasting time. Indeed, the awarding of Avg+ or Avg- could be automatically based on the actual time consumed by each side without any need for the TD to intervene.

 

I had a recent situation in a vugraph of a major final where the operator in the closed room (which finished about 15 minutes late) was quized by the TD as to which side he felt was to blame. The operator couldn't really tell as he had been concentrating on getting the bidding and play right rather than who was consuming time. It would've been really useful for the TD if some time statistics could've been extracted from BBO.

 

I would suggest that during a round or a match, a cumulative tally be made of the number of seconds each partnership paused when it was their turn to do something over a pre-determined threshold, say 5 seconds during the bidding and play and 15 seconds for the opening bid. In a vugraph scenario, the timing would automatically pause when the claim is made and then would not restart until the next board is loaded.

 

When a match does run into time problems, the TD will be able to see an objective and reasonably accurate measure of who has been wasting time. Of course it can never be completely accurate as the vugraph operator wont alway click on the bids and plays in the same tempo as the players, but the operator tempo variations will almost certainly even themselves out over the course of a match.

 

Such a facility would be a good feature to pitch to tournament organisers when trying to get permission to vugraph their events.