Veldhoven technical problems

[mrdct]

For not the first time I've seen during this event, the operators had difficulty during the QF2 segment to redeal to a new board midway through the match I was commentating on and it seems there were problems with other tables having to restart also at or about the same time. Eventually the BBO staff onsite got it back up and running but the play data for the earlier boards seemed to have been lost.

 

I'm certainly not trying assign blame or anything, but I'm keen to know what caused the problem so that I, and other BBO operators/supervisors, will be in a better position to avoid similar problems with our presentations.

 

My preliminary suspect is a corrupt hand data (.dup) file which was fine for boards 17-23 but had some unexpected, incomplete or incompatible data in the row for board 24 which stopped BBO from being able to redeal to it. I'm not sure if it's part of the procedures being used in Veldhoven, but something I always do after I've loaded the hand data file and entered the match details, but before I login to BBO and start the presentation, is quickly click through the hands to make sure they coincide with the expected number of boards and all load properly which takes no more than 10 seconds for a 16-board set. Even better, if I have a cooperative director, is to check the first and last hand against the hand-record.

 

If and when the vugraph operating functionality moves to the flash version, it would be useful if there were some in-built data integrity checks.

[fred]

For not the first time I've seen during this event, the operators had difficulty during the QF2 segment to redeal to a new board midway through the match I was commentating on and it seems there were problems with other tables having to restart also at or about the same time. Eventually the BBO staff onsite got it back up and running but the play data for the earlier boards seemed to have been lost.

 

I'm certainly not trying assign blame or anything, but I'm keen to know what caused the problem so that I, and other BBO operators/supervisors, will be in a better position to avoid similar problems with our presentations.

 

My preliminary suspect is a corrupt hand data (.dup) file which was fine for boards 17-23 but had some unexpected, incomplete or incompatible data in the row for board 24 which stopped BBO from being able to redeal to it. I'm not sure if it's part of the procedures being used in Veldhoven, but something I always do after I've loaded the hand data file and entered the match details, but before I login to BBO and start the presentation, is quickly click through the hands to make sure they coincide with the expected number of boards and all load properly which takes no more than 10 seconds for a 16-board set. Even better, if I have a cooperative director, is to check the first and last hand against the hand-record.

 

If and when the vugraph operating functionality moves to the flash version, it would be useful if there were some in-built data integrity checks.

For the past couple of years vugraph at WBF events has not used .dup files (or any other format of files for that matter) to get the deal records into BBO. Instead there is a server on site through which the vugraph operator's BBO client program downloads the record of each deal when the time comes to actually play that deal. The main purpose of this set up is increased security.

 

Whatever has been going wrong is related to this mechanism. I have made myself available to help with any problems that might arise, but so far none of the WBF staff have contacted me about this problem. I suspect this means that they don't think the problem can be addressed by software changes on our end.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com