Time Counters

[Lukasz K.]

When I'm directing the tourney, I would like to know who and how long was played. Sometimes I'm called for adjust because of "slow play opps". I would like check it :) It needs a lot of system-resources, but...

[skorchev]

Hi Lukasz,

 

I agree with you. When you direct one normal 12-board tourney there are at least 2 calls for adjustment because of slow play.

 

I don't know how difficult to do will be this function, but it will be very good for the TDs.

 

Stefan

[jtfanclub]

When I'm directing the tourney, I would like to know who and how long was played. Sometimes I'm called for adjust because of "slow play opps". I would like check it :) It needs a lot of system-resources, but...

It's too easy to abuse. My opponents are slow players. We get, just barely, to the last board in time. We bid something stupid, and as soon as dummy comes down I can see it's a low board. So I slow down. And down, and down.

 

Right now, the best I can hope for is an A-, and more likely an adjustment. But if there's such a clock, then I can have you look at the record and sure enough, the opps were slower than we were. So now, by slow playing, I got myself an A+.

 

Me, I'll settle for something different. When it shows who's still playing on the tourney status screen, give the people in order of what board they're playing. So, if tables 1-8 are still playing the round, and table 6 is on board 10, tables 1 and 8 are on board 11, and all the rest are on board 12, the list says "8 tables still playing (6 1 8 2 3 4 5 7) instead of 1-8 in order. That gives me a chance to kibbitz the slow tables without going through every table to see which one is slow.

[skorchev]

It's too easy to abuse. My opponents are slow players. We get, just barely, to the last board in time. We bid something stupid, and as soon as dummy comes down I can see it's a low board. So I slow down. And down, and down.

 

Right now, the best I can hope for is an A-, and more likely an adjustment. But if there's such a clock, then I can have you look at the record and sure enough, the opps were slower than we were. So now, by slow playing, I got myself an A+.

 

The problem isn't when you have 2-3 cards to the finish, then we can adjust the real result. The problem is when the board is never started and both sides got "A--" and the one say "Our opps played slow, no A-" then if this Time Counter is available we can check and adjust to "A+-".

 

Stefan

[DrTodd13]

This suggestion is workable. It will require only minute additional resources on the server. Each client can keep track of each person's think time for each hand. At the end of the hand, the client sends the computed think time to the server and this is stored in the record. You could tell if one player in the partnership was slow although you couldn't penalize that person individually, you could issue a warning individually. You could detect situations where one pair are responsible for one slow board and the other pair for a second slow board.

 

Todd

[Free]

Timecounters could be helpfull, but imo there's still some kind of danger in it:

 

During the bidding, sometimes opps just refuse to give a good answer to a question. So who is wasting time, and how can you get a timecounter to decide which side is using time?

 

Just to give an example: I once asked a pair about his alerted 1♣ bid. He explained it as "p". I clicked again, and he made it "pc". Then my partner clicked (I think) and it went "no information available". I never saw anything about a GF handtype, or a NT 12-14 or whatever, but I suppose he was playing polish club.

 

So how will a program know who is wasting time? And can't anyone make abuse of such a system? Suppose the program counts the time for opps while opps have to explain any of their bids. Then a player who has to bid can click endless on any bid to let opps "use" the time, and think during "their" time, or even call the TD afterwards for slow play from opps (which would hopefully get noticed soon enough)!!!

[paulhar]

There's other issues here too. Say the N/S pair is slow on Board 1 of a 4 board round where Board 4 (and maybe Board 3) probably won't finish. To avoid blame, they try to make E/W be slow on Board 2. North has an easy claim but since E/W rankled him about his slow play on Board 1, North plays it out, giving East and West each the problem of trying to figure out what cards declarer could possibly be holding to have a problem. Clearly, E/W will not be that fast on this hand, trying to figure out a problem that doesn't exist, and it will look as if both pairs are at fault for not being able to complete the round.

[etherwiz]

Perhaps the easiest solution would be a simple Elapsed Time psted to the whatever is sent. The elasped time is started when ever something (a bid, a Alert (or private chat) from opp, a card play) and is also sent with whatever from your machine in response.

 

This way the elasped time for any sequence of events can be easily seen.

 

Probably be a night mare of changing code (something so much easier when code is just added),

 

This would probably not be worth the effort expended (except to the TD's)

 

I could see where this could very usefull .....................

 

_*_Dave

[lipi]

I think you shouldn't forget that this issue is also unresolved in real-life tournaments. There the solution is that either the pair who isn't playing slow calls the director during the play of the hand, and then the director can decide himself, or calls only after the hand. In this case the guilty pair "should" admit they were actually slow.

 

The same should work here as well. The only problem would be "unfair play" :P but if someone wants to cheat, there will always be a way to do that.

 

Gabor