Club bridge, hand records missing

[jillybean]

I’m playing a lot of live bridge now and I love it but for one major frustration – NO HAND RECORDS.

Unlike some people, I cannot remember the last board I played, let alone a dozen boards when I want to review after the game.

As far a I know, only one or two games do provide hand records in my city – is this usual for North America? I know in New Zealand hand records are standard and card fee’s are $4 ($3 CA) compared to the $8 I pay here.

 

Where does my $8 go and why do we not get hand records?

[Cascade]

Lethagy.

[barmar]

Come to Boston.

 

Most clubs in this area now have dealing machines and provide hand records, and Bridgemates area also starting to become common.

[awm]

To have hand records, you basically need to either have the players duplicate boards, or have dealing machines (yeah in principle director can deal all the boards but that's a huge amount of work).

 

Most players don't like doing the work of duplicating, although tournaments pretty routinely ask them to do it. So if your local club doesn't have a dealing machine, you're probably out of luck. Card fees here in Los Angeles are more like $9-10 (US) and only some of the games have hand records.

[Cascade]

1. It takes about half an hour to deal a set of boards (say 24-27 deals) from a preprinted hand record. This could easily be done in the idle time during one session of directing for a future session.

 

2. If the players record the hand on the traveller then they could also record on a pickup slip which the director could then easily paste together and photocopy the handwritten record of the hands.

[blackshoe]

To have hand records, you basically need to either have the players duplicate boards, or have dealing machines (yeah in principle director can deal all the boards but that's a huge amount of work).

 

Most players don't like doing the work of duplicating, although tournaments pretty routinely ask them to do it. So if your local club doesn't have a dealing machine, you're probably out of luck. Card fees here in Los Angeles are more like $9-10 (US) and only some of the games have hand records.

Card fees here in Rochester NY are running 6-6.50, and players throw fits whenever clubs decide to (try to) increase them. I run a small Friday night game for which the fee is 6 bucks. If I raised it to 6.50 (which most games here did long ago) I wouldn't have a game to run. Hm. Maybe I should do that.

 

The local association (RABA, has a duplimate machine, so we get hand records. Sometimes there aren't enough to go around. Again, the players throw fits. Originally (first year or two) there was no charge for duplicated boards. Now RABA is charging $4 a set, and that covers maybe 2/3 of their costs (most of which is for printing the hand records). Several other areas of which I'm aware charge upwards of $6 a set.

 

I do recall, when I lived in England, dealing hands before the first round, and then having each player right down his hand (usually after it was played, iirc) on a "curtain card" which was then passed along with the board. I think (again, memory is fuzzy) that players in subsequent rounds were expected to check the curtain card and make sure their hands conformed to it when they took their hands out of the board. I suppose Americans might consider that onerous, possibly on the "not invented here" theory or the "I never heard of such a thing" theory, but it didn't seem so to me when I was doing it.

[Elianna]

I do recall, when I lived in England, dealing hands before the first round, and then having each player right down his hand (usually after it was played, iirc) on a "curtain card" which was then passed along with the board. I think (again, memory is fuzzy) that players in subsequent rounds were expected to check the curtain card and make sure their hands conformed to it when they took their hands out of the board. I suppose Americans might consider that onerous, possibly on the "not invented here" theory or the "I never heard of such a thing" theory, but it didn't seem so to me when I was doing it.

When I played at one club game in Israel that did that. I was told that they used to do that in tournaments too, but stopped when someone went around looking at the little cards before the hands were played. I have no first-hand knowledge of the veracity of this claim, but perhaps this is a reason it's not done more often (and it wasn't done in other clubs I played at there). There was another club that did something slightly different, where you wrote the hands on the traveller, so you were supposed to verify the hands after you played the contract.

 

...players throw fits whenever clubs decide to (try to) increase them.

 

Same here in LA, along with complaints whenever card fees are a dollar higher for special events like STaCs. But they still keep coming back.

 

I sometimes wish that some players who say that they won't come back would sign an affidavit to that effect.

[Mbodell]

In the San Jose area both of our local units provide hand records and preduplicated boards for all of our club games. Hand fees are usually $8 or $9 dollars. San Jose recently got a dealing machine, but all but one of the directors were preduplicating the boards by hand before the dealing machine.

 

But the dealing machines are certainly handy if you want to have multiple board sets like for barometer events or for swiss teams with hand records (which happens some times, but not always, at the club/sectional area around us for swiss teams).

 

Really you should try to whip up support for it with the other players and then get your directors to do it!

[Cascade]

Its normal here with hand dealt cards to write the hands on the traveller.

 

At least then after a game a keen player can seek out the traveller to find the exact hand.

[Fluffy]

Here it is as Wayne is saying, and on my local you can even pick the travellers and get them home since nobody is interested in them after the tournament is over.

 

There was an old guy (recently died sadly) who had the hand records of EVERY (or so he claimed) hand he played in his life with statistics about (not very good).

[McBruce]

1. It takes about half an hour to deal a set of boards (say 24-27 deals) from a preprinted hand record. This could easily be done in the idle time during one session of directing for a future session.

 

2. If the players record the hand on the traveller then they could also record on a pickup slip which the director could then easily paste together and photocopy the handwritten record of the hands.

1. When I am on my game I can do 32 or so in an hour. That's probably as fast as it gets unless you are actually DEALING the pre-sorted cards. (My time is from an unsorted deck.) Even then, I would still guess that half an hour would be a bit low. A related problem is that players cannot be relied upon to suit and sort accurately -- they accidentally put cards in the slots AKQJT97865423 quite often, and some have been known to place the cards face up in the slots with the deuces up, but after removing, sorting and dealing you find that that is ALL that they've done and you're back at square one.

 

2. Might work, but it would look pretty bad. I have a hard enough time reading scores from pickups at most of the games I direct. Reading hand records written by these anticalligraphists would be torture... :rolleyes:

 

However, Cascade, you have hit upon the key point when you mention "the idle time during one session of directing..." Read on...

[McBruce]

I’m playing a lot of live bridge now and I love it but for one major frustration – NO HAND RECORDS.

Unlike some people, I cannot remember the last board I played, let alone a dozen boards when I want to review after the game.

As far a I know, only one or two games do provide hand records in my city – is this usual for North America? I know in New Zealand hand records are standard and card fee’s are $4 ($3 CA) compared to the $8 I pay here.

This looks like McBruce-bait. :rolleyes:

 

JB, you know exactly where to go and when in order to get hand records. In most of the club and Unit games I direct, I use a program I wrote to enter the player-dealt hands into a computer and another program to render the hands in printable XHTML. The first program combines the ACBLScore output to get this onto our webpage, and the second program produces hand records that look like this.

 

During the idle time in a normal session (even in a shorter mid-week 20-21 board session we run on Wednesday night for only $7) there is, it turns out, ample time to temporarily remove the boards not currently in play, take them back to the desk, input the West, South, and East hands (leaving the North hand and traveler undisturbed), and get them back to the players before they even miss it. It is even a better solution than using computer-dealt hands and having players pre-duplicate. I used to do this but I got tired of the complaints about computer hands and the allegations (no, really, there were allegations) that I had deliberately written the program to deal weird hands.

 

But JB -- you knew all this? Why haven't I seen you in a while? :)

[Cascade]

Do you have your own double dummy solver?

[McBruce]

Where does my $8 go and why do we not get hand records?

ACBL sanction fees take about a quarter.

 

Directors are paid and at our club at least we make $60-$90 most sessions, depending on how many tables show up. So that's probably a buck or two.

 

Rental of the premises is a huge item and can range from virtually nothing (rent space in a church basement by making a deductible religious donation!) to more than you would believe. Rental for the club I work at was ridiculously high, and I say 'was' because that was three difficult lease-negotiations ago. At a guess I would say that is a huge chunk of your entry fee, at this club anyhow.

 

In every game there are fill-in players and club staff members who don't pay entry fees, meaning that a little more of the paying customers' money goes to the expenses the club incurs to run the game.

 

The club also needs to pay for electricity, water, telephone, internet, computer equipment and supplies, bridge playing equipment and supplies, upkeep on the premises, janitorial services and supplies, business licenses, and it seems no game can survive unless there is a food table somewhere. Sometimes I think we must be responsible for the survival of at least a small village in Columbia for our coffee consumption and probably are helping to keep a dishwasher liquid company afloat, with two or three dishwasher loads a day.

 

By now there is probably very little left of your entry fee, and we haven't even discussed the owner's cut (if there is one).

 

Adding hand records (and a $1,000 laser printer to print them, plus $200 for a new toner every two months) probably wasn't even a major expense in the big picture.

[McBruce]

Do you have your own double dummy solver?

My program links to a rather old freeware double dummy solver which uses the public domain GIB engine. Takes 10-25 minutes to do the analysis, so I need to have the hands entered before the game is 75% over to get them in.

[jillybean]

This looks like McBruce-bait.  :)

 

Not at all, sorry you think that. Perhaps I should have said McBruces games are the only games that regulary provide hand records but I'm not certain that is true. I dont play in all of the games around here and only see hand records from special, usualy extra cost games. If I could chose the games I played in I would play in yours exclusively because you do provide the hand records and of course youre a good and very pleasant director, as are the other directors I know. Unfortunately my schedule means I grab games when I can and it doesnt often mesh with your games.

 

Forget printing the hands, the next step is of course to offer downloadable lin files so the players can review and replay the hands. To give you the credit you deserve, we`ve talked about this and you did say would see what you could do to give me a file.

 

 

I do wonder why other players arent concerned that hand records are not a standard offering here. They dont need them, dont care or are all playing in McBruces games. :)

 

I`d happily pay an extra $1 to get a printout at the end of the game or maybe I could convert MP`s into HR`s.

[Phil]

1. It takes about half an hour to deal a set of boards (say 24-27 deals) from a preprinted hand record. This could easily be done in the idle time during one session of directing for a future session.

Sure if you're Lee Majors.

 

By the way, unless you have an efficient number of tables, like 9 or 13, you'll need more than 24-27 hands for a typical movement.

 

When I duplicated for last year's sectional tournaments at Clubs, it would take me about 90 minutes to do a set of 36 boards.

[jillybean]

1. It takes about half an hour to deal a set of boards (say 24-27 deals) from a preprinted hand record.  This could easily be done in the idle time during one session of directing for a future session.

Sure if you're Lee Majors.

 

I think it could be Kiwi ingenuity

 

 

Kiwi ingenuity: This is the idea that New Zealanders display a MacGyver-like ability to solve any problem, often using unconventional means or whatever happens to be lying around. This is also described as the Number 8 wire mentality, which holds that anything can be made or fixed with basic or everyday materials, such as number 8 fencing wire. New Zealanders seen as embodying this quality include Burt Munro (subject of The World's Fastest Indian) and Richard Pearse, who some believe achieved flight before the Wright Brothers. Kiwi ingenuity is also linked to the phrase "she'll be right, mate" (shared with Australia), which expresses the belief that the situation, repairs, or whatever has been done is adequate or sufficient for what is needed. It is seen less positively than Kiwi ingenuity, especially if something goes wrong. Kiwi ingenuity is not strictly a male preserve, although it is generally spoken of in relation to men.

[JanM]

Although the question you asked was how to persuade clubs to produce hand records, I'd like to suggest that another alternative, that might actually improve your game equally well, would be to work on your memory. Try writing the auctions down on your scorecard & then after the game go over the hands and see whether you can recreate the hands and the play. I know some people who started this sort of process by writing their own hands down on the scoresheet. I find the auction easier to write down and usually enough to jog my memory.

 

One of the most important things all of us can do to improve is to do a better job of visualizing all 4 hands during the bidding and play. In fact, one expert I know suggested that the reason men are usually better than women (at the top level) in bridge is because they are better able to visualize things (males usually do better on spatial relation type tests for instance). I know that it takes me a serious effort to form a picture of the entire hand and that when I do so I play better.

 

I remember one session I played with my former husband, before hand records existed, where I happened to leave on a trip immediately after the game. When I got home, he commented that he'd gone through the scores and had recreated all of the hands relatively easily. I know another expert who routinely goes through his scores and not only recreates the hands but writes up what happened and what he thinks he and his partner could have done to improve. I'm sure there are many reasons why both of these players are world champions, but the fact that they pay enough attention to each hand to be able to recreate the hands and what happened later is surely one reason.

[jillybean]

A related problem is that players cannot be relied upon to suit and sort accurately -- they accidentally put cards in the slots AKQJT97865423 quite often, and some have been known to place the cards face up in the slots with the deuces up, but after removing, sorting and dealing you find that that is ALL that they've done and you're back at square one.

I wouldn`t have thought this would cause problems in your games, bridge players are smart people. Maybe one or two newbies who need help to create deals, but a table with 4 complete bunnies, hmm. That surprises me!

[Cascade]

1. It takes about half an hour to deal a set of boards (say 24-27 deals) from a preprinted hand record.  This could easily be done in the idle time during one session of directing for a future session.

Sure if you're Lee Majors.

 

By the way, unless you have an efficient number of tables, like 9 or 13, you'll need more than 24-27 hands for a typical movement.

 

When I duplicated for last year's sectional tournaments at Clubs, it would take me about 90 minutes to do a set of 36 boards.

Maybe my 30 minutes was from stripped boards - cards in suits and in order. When I predeal them I deal them face up and verbalized the cards as I deal them into the appropriate pile while looking at the hand record and at the cards - "club 2, club 3, club 4 ..." this catches most errors. It doesnt take much extra effort to look at the cards after they have been dealt since they are already sorted in suits to quickly check the accuracy.

 

What sort of typical movements do you play?

 

At our club we have had between 9 and 13 tables this year and we always play between 24 and 27 boards. There are easy movements for these numbers.

[Cascade]

Although the question you asked was how to persuade clubs to produce hand records, I'd like to suggest that another alternative, that might actually improve your game equally well, would be to work on your memory. Try writing the auctions down on your scorecard & then after the game go over the hands and see whether you can recreate the hands and the play. I know some people who started this sort of process by writing their own hands down on the scoresheet. I find the auction easier to write down and usually enough to jog my memory.

 

One of the most important things all of us can do to improve is to do a better job of visualizing all 4 hands during the bidding and play. In fact, one expert I know suggested that the reason men are usually better than women (at the top level) in bridge is because they are better able to visualize things (males usually do better on spatial relation type tests for instance). I know that it takes me a serious effort to form a picture of the entire hand and that when I do so I play better.

 

I remember one session I played with my former husband, before hand records existed, where I happened to leave on a trip immediately after the game. When I got home, he commented that he'd gone through the scores and had recreated all of the hands relatively easily. I know another expert who routinely goes through his scores and not only recreates the hands but writes up what happened and what he thinks he and his partner could have done to improve. I'm sure there are many reasons why both of these players are world champions, but the fact that they pay enough attention to each hand to be able to recreate the hands and what happened later is surely one reason.

Do you mean including all of the spot cards?

[McBruce]

A related problem is that players cannot be relied upon to suit and sort accurately -- they accidentally put cards in the slots AKQJT97865423 quite often, and some have been known to place the cards face up in the slots with the deuces up, but after removing, sorting and dealing you find that that is ALL that they've done and you're back at square one.

I wouldn`t have thought this would cause problems in your games, bridge players are smart people. Maybe one or two newbies who need help to create deals, but a table with 4 complete bunnies, hmm. That surprises me!

I was referring to the idea that you can get players to put the cards into suits, ordered A thru 2, after the game, so that dealing out the next set is quicker. Doesn't work. 80% is about the best you can expect, with 15% not doing it at all, 4% doing it but making errors (AKQTJ98675432) somewhere, and 1% starting the job but quitting at some point and putting the deuces on top to make it look like it's been done.

 

My method, which does take a period of time to get used to, is to just grab the completely unsorted deck and scan for each card as it comes up: 4♠ goes here, K♦ goes here, 7♥ goes here. This is a bit slower, but faster overall--the time saved by dealing in order is lost if you need to pre-sort the decks. It's best on the neck muscles to have the hand record raised like the monitor screen you're looking at as you read this -- you should be able to deal cards into four piles not looking down, without any overlaps.

 

Excellent Lee Majors reference, Phil! B)

[jillybean]

A related problem is that players cannot be relied upon to suit and sort accurately -- they accidentally put cards in the slots AKQJT97865423 quite often, and some have been known to place the cards face up in the slots with the deuces up, but after removing, sorting and dealing you find that that is ALL that they've done and you're back at square one.

I wouldn`t have thought this would cause problems in your games, bridge players are smart people. Maybe one or two newbies who need help to create deals, but a table with 4 complete bunnies, hmm. That surprises me!

I was referring to the idea that you can get players to put the cards into suits, ordered A thru 2, after the game, so that dealing out the next set is quicker. Doesn't work. 80% is about the best you can expect, with 15% not doing it at all, 4% doing it but making errors (AKQTJ98675432) somewhere, and 1% starting the job but quitting at some point and putting the deuces on top to make it look like it's been done.

 

My method, which does take a period of time to get used to, is to just grab the completely unsorted deck and scan for each card as it comes up: 4♠ goes here, K♦ goes here, 7♥ goes here. This is a bit slower, but faster overall--the time saved by dealing in order is lost if you need to pre-sort the decks. It's best on the neck muscles to have the hand record raised like the monitor screen you're looking at as you read this -- you should be able to deal cards into four piles not looking down, without any overlaps.

 

Excellent Lee Majors reference, Phil! B)

 

I didnt read your post correctly.

 

80% doesnt sound like such a bad result and would still make your job much easier?

Silly question perhaps but do the players understand the reason for sorting the boards is so that they get hand records!

 

How important do you think hand records are to the players?

[McBruce]

How important do you think hand records are to the players?

Depends on the player, or on the result they get in the game: few with bad scores want one. I think having a facility to post them on the Internet is important. Once players realize you're always going to do that, you don't need to print as many copies. I usually print about 1.5 per table and leave the file open so I can print more if needed.

 

However, I do believe they are a key element in building a game, and building a reputation as a TD who cares.