Cheating?

[Vampyr]

by the time the round is 35-40 minutes old, the early finishers are wandering freely among those tables still playing, and standing in pairs or small clusters of people discussing the round's points of interest, all within earshot of active tables.

 

I would love to see someone try this one in the EBU.

[phil_20686]

In every regional or sectional team event that I've ever witnessed (all of which were hand-dealt), by the time the round is 35-40 minutes old, the early finishers are wandering freely among those tables still playing, and standing in pairs or small clusters of people discussing the round's points of interest, all within earshot of active tables. The directors will frequently make a plea for calm, but as they are engaged in the busiest part of the round dealing with incoming score reports, and as nobody has ever actually received a penalty for such behavior as far as I'm aware, such pleas are almost universally ignored; at best the chaos is momentarily reduced to a dull roar.

 

I have never experience this in an EBU event. Occasionally, if you are one of the last few tables in play in a large event there will be some level of background noise.

 

Sounds like your events are poorly planned. Is there no place to stand and chat outside? Normally the EBU events are held in hotels of some description, and by the simple expedient of putting the hand records outside the door they insure that basically everyone leaves immediately upon finishing a session.

[Vampyr]

We'll see when she replies, but I'd be a bit surprised if so, because that's not a method that's ever been used here and, although Stefanie is American, I don't think she's played much in the ACBL for a very long time.

 

LOL last time I played more than a biannual session in the ACBL was before VPs, before platinum points, before bracketed knockouts, etc. Fire had been tamed, of that I am certain*, but any other details are lost in the mists of time.

 

*Edit: because there was always a smoking room at the end of the hall.

[the hog]

Our local sectional Swiss is usually around 60 tables. That means 30 sets of 56 boards, or over 1600 boards.

 

So you get duplicating machines, whats the big deal? (Sorry!)

[the hog]

I would love to see someone try this one in the EBU.

 

Or in Australia for that matter.

[barmar]

So you get duplicating machines, whats the big deal? (Sorry!)

Of course you use duplicating machines. But 1600 boards is a huge number of boards to duplicate (even with machines) and transport. With hand-dealing they only need about 200 boards for 60 tables. A two-session pair game needs about twice that many.

 

Someone said that you can share boards between more than two tables, so you don't need so many. How does this work?

[gordontd]

Someone said that you can share boards between more than two tables, so you don't need so many. How does this work?

You put boards out around the entire room, two at a time, and get the players to pass each completed board to the next table. So, for eight board matches you need a minimum of one set for four tables.

[phil_20686]

I don't really understand your point barmar. Boards are not that expensive, considering how many tournaments use you get out of them. The dealing machines I saw in china took huge stacks of boards and seemed to deal several a minute, so you could easily deal 1600 boards in a single day of preparation. If you had several machines you could probably do it in the morning before the tournament began.

 

You just get your regional association to invest and then they cart the machines around in a van to every tournament, or have them at a central location and just cart the boards back and forward. The EBU seems to run about twenty or so national events a year, so they get plenty of use. Assuming they last several years, dividing by all the entrants in 20 tournaments a year for five years does not add much at all to the cost of each tournament.

[Vampyr]

Someone said that you can share boards between more than two tables, so you don't need so many. How does this work?

 

You put boards out around the entire room, two at a time, and get the players to pass each completed board to the next table. So, for eight board matches you need a minimum of one set for four tables.

 

Surely the ACBL is not so far behind in technology that they haven't worked out passing boards yet!

[barmar]

Surely the ACBL is not so far behind in technology that they haven't worked out passing boards yet!

We figured it out for pair games, we've just never had to do it in team games. We have caddies swapping the boards between the two tables of the team match.

[Oof Arted]

The big advantage of hand-dealing is that it does not matter what you hear from the surrounding tables. In my limited experience there are quite a few loud players in the ACBL.

 

The lack of hand records frustrates one of my team enormously, as she'd prefer to go through every card. As the rest of us prefer drinking, this is another upside to hand-dealing.

 

 

Love that one Paul :D

[Oof Arted]

You put boards out around the entire room, two at a time, and get the players to pass each completed board to the next table. So, for eight board matches you need a minimum of one set for four tables.

 

 

 

oooo gordon musnt teach them there yanks ;)

[squealydan]

Our club's team night involves 30 teams and we get by with five sets of boards. Each set of boards sit on a middle table, with 6 playing tables around it, and the player from each table nearest the boards fetches them and takes them back after every hand. The boards are therefore usually played in a completely random order. You occasionally have to wait at the end of the round if someone is playing the last board you need but in general it works fine and tables playing at very different speeds get to go at their pace. (We play 2x 12 board sessions per match - I can see that for 8-board sessions you might need a higher ratio of boards to tables.)

[jillybean]

Thanks great information, I knew nothing about board movements. I've got to wonder why we don't do something

smarter with our boards here, McBruce?!

[Elianna]

We figured it out for pair games, we've just never had to do it in team games. We have caddies swapping the boards between the two tables of the team match.

 

I've been told that the reason for this is that if there's a misduplication of a preduped board, it still arrives the same way for both tables of a match.

[Vampyr]

I've been told that the reason for this is that if there's a misduplication of a preduped board, it still arrives the same way for both tables of a match.

 

An even better reason is that the boards are not duplicated.

[Elianna]

An even better reason is that the boards are not duplicated.

 

In some national swiss, they do predup the boards for the top matches. Also in certain rounds of the Spingold.

 

I was referring to those such circumstances.

[Vampyr]

In some national swiss, they do predup the boards for the top matches. Also in certain rounds of the Spingold.

 

I was referring to those such circumstances.

 

OK. Misduplication is so rare, though, that it is not a very good reason for not using duplicated boards on a larger scale.

[Elianna]

OK. Misduplication is so rare, though, that it is not a very good reason for not using duplicated boards on a larger scale.

 

I don't disagree. I was just addressing the question of why ACBL hasn't figured out how to use less predupped boards in team games when they might use predupped boards.

[McBruce]

...another thread that has morphed past its title...

 

Thanks great information, I knew nothing about board movements. I've got to wonder why we don't do something

smarter with our boards here, McBruce?!

 

It might have something to do with the fact that in District 19, the same person (me) is responsible for producing Daily Bulletins, putting the Bulletins and results pages on the web, and preduplicating all the deals for the pair games ... and that there are only 24 hours in a day.

 

Most players here tend to read a lot into the words "Swiss Teams." They expect caddies, shuffling each round, the occasional round-robin (but they are prepared to storm the TDs table if they are made to play two of them), but not hand records. It took the better part of two decades for us to remove the terms "winning tie" and "losing tie" from the vocabulary. It will take a similar time, assuming we start now, to teach players that it's a 7 or 8-board match but they only get two to start, they'll get the boards they need eventually (some might be a different colour), and that it is important to pass boards as soon as they've played them, instead of dropping them on the floor or putting them under the other boards (usually upside-down so they don't accidentally replay them). Trying to make this sea change now simply results in chaos and anger. I know, I've tried, and quite frankly I'm tired of the abuse I get from players who want things as they've always been until they die.

 

I think the compromise at the moment for District 19's Regionals is that some of the AX Swisses are running preduplicated boards for the second session, if you are in the top four or five matches (just which matches actually are the top four or five, is a guess -- the results do not come out simultaneously in an ACBL Swiss: ACBLScore matches pairs with similar scores when results are entered). For these AX Swisses they ask me to preduplicate four or five complete sets of 32 for four 8-board matches. In reality, if the players would stop complaining about anything new (or, more likely, blaming it, when their results are not as good as they'd hoped), we could preduplicate two sets of eight for each round to cover the top four matches. But the district has already spent over $5K on two duplicating machines (which for some reason cannot cross the US-Canada border), more extra money to ensure there are enough sets of boards at tournaments (preduplicating in advance requires more boards), and more extra money to compensate me for what I assure you is a very difficult and exhausting week, one which pays me less than directing would. In Penticton last year (a 3200-table Regional) I preduplicated over 120 36-board sets in six days, sometimes eight hours of work, AFTER an overnighter of preparing Daily Bulletins and posting results to the web. Oh yes, and I was sick as a dog all week, too. Adding Swiss Teams to the list of events that are preduplicated would require even more board sets (along with our suppliers entire stock, we needed eight sets of Vancouver's boards last year to have enough) and would require more trained operators to do the job.

 

At local sectionals we face pretty much the same problem: we need someone else to do the duplicating. I can handle the 12-16 sets for pair games that we need on a sectional weekend by making about half of them in advance and the other half on Saturday morning and between sessions. But during a weekend where I am directing 4-7 sessions, that's about all I can do. For a 40-table Swiss we would need ten sets of boards and significant time to preduplicate them, once for each session. We have just that many sets, but 5-8 of them are in use until we leave on Saturday night. Someone (not me) could come in very early on Sunday morning and preduplicate ten sets of 1-8 in about an hour or so. If they got the first three or four matches preduplicated before the game began, they would probably be able to keep up. But now you have more complications. What if ten extra teams show up? What do we do when inevitably someone shuffles and one-quarter of the room follows suit before we figure out what's happening? How are we going to handle the huge job of picking up all the boards from all the tables AND putting out the next rounds' worth, in that hectic time when we are waiting forever for the final team to report? I have tried this at the club level in a smaller one-session team game (or Swiss Pairs) at the club, and the collecting of the boards and putting out of the next ones can be a daunting task.

 

Another reason we in this area of the world have not embraced the duplicating machine as much as other areas is that our local supplier makes very nice quality old-style metal boards in beautiful colours that last. Understandably, neither he nor the district is interested in replacing these with the new type that is inserted into the duplicating machine, saving the operator time. When I have to both unload the cards and reload them one hand at a time, the best I can do, and it took a lot of practice to get this far, is about 100 boards an hour. Probably with the newer duplicate boards this can be improved to 125-150 per hour. Although I must admit that I wonder about these boards that open up so the cards can drop into them. Do they last as long as metal boards do? Hinges tend to wear out over time. Ask anyone who ever owned a dot-matrix printer (another feature of ACBL tournaments).

 

You really need to give the District time to adapt. They are looking at this new acquisition and noting that it is costing them a fair chuck of money, and while people who play pair games at tournaments appreciate it, it is not exactly producing more revenue in terms of increased attendance, at least not yet. Hand records in team games are not something you can wave a magic wand at and make happen: a combination of player resistance to new things, significant extra costs in equipment and operator labour for the organizers, and understandable resistance by Directors of new and potentially disastrous ways of organizing games, all create some large obstacles.

[the hog]

I've been told that the reason for this is that if there's a misduplication of a preduped board, it still arrives the same way for both tables of a match.

 

Surely you have curtain cards in the card slots so that each player checks that what she picks up is the actual hand that was pre dealt. With all due respects, a lack of prre dealt boards and hand records really is a display of amateurism that is perhaps acceptable at club levels but not any higher than that.

[BunnyGo]

Surely you have curtain cards in the card slots so that each player checks that what she picks up is the actual hand that was pre dealt. With all due respects, a lack of prre dealt boards and hand records really is a display of amateurism that is perhaps acceptable at club levels but not any higher than that.

 

I'd never even heard of curtain cards (the term nor the concept) while in ACBL land. If used correctly, it'd be one of the things I much prefer about Israeli bridge.

[gordontd]

Surely you have curtain cards in the card slots so that each player checks that what she picks up is the actual hand that was pre dealt.

Over here, curtain cards were abandoned as pointless at the time that pre-duplicated boards came in. We do however do fairly extensive board checking before the start of play.

[the hog]

Gordon

Even with pre duplicated boards you can get misboarding. Why not ensure you are playing the correct hand?

 

BunnyGo

A curtain card is a card showing what the hand should be. It sits on top of the actual cards, face down, of course, - you pull it out of the slot, check your hand and replace it. It solve many problems and the dealing machine can create them anyway, so it is no extra work.

 

In Victoria, even in club events, the hand records are published on the web site the day after the event, so anyone can download them.

[Vampyr]

How are we going to handle the huge job of picking up all the boards from all the tables AND putting out the next rounds' worth, in that hectic time when we are waiting forever for the final team to report?

 

Well, you have lots of concerns and I'm afraid I have a helpful suggestion for only one of them!

 

In the EBU, new boards aren't put out until the previous round is finished and the players are seated, so picking up and putting out boards are separated by a bit of time.

 

Gordon

Even with pre duplicated boards you can get misboarding. Why not ensure you are playing the correct hand?

 

BunnyGo

A curtain card is a card showing what the hand should be. It sits on top of the actual cards, face down, of course, - you pull it out of the slot, check your hand and replace it. It solve many problems and the dealing machine can create them anyway, so it is no extra work.

 

In Victoria, even in club events, the hand records are published on the web site the day after the event, so anyone can download them.

 

I do not believe that the machines used in the EBU can create curtain cards -- I do not see how. We use Duplimate machines whose only input is stacks of decks of cards and which produce no output apart from sorting the decks into the boards. So the curtain cards would have to be printed onto sheets of paper, cut out and inserted into the correct slots in the boards. This operation would require significantly more time than the duplication itself. EDIT: No, not more than the duplicating actually. Still, when you are duplicating lots of sets of boards the extra time become very significant.

 

Anyway it is nearly impossible for the machine to get it wrong. Fouled boards are normally caused by player actions. Yes, curtain cards (written out at the end of the first round) would be useful for this, but doing this is so boring and unpopular with the players, and anyway this happens infrequently, especially if the players responsible get fined.

 

Also curtain cards get lost, placed back in the wrong slots, left on the tables where they might be seen by the wonrg players,