Wireless Scoring

[Frager]

Does anyone know of any club that has reverted from machine dealt hands to manually dealt hands?

[mycroft]

Quoting from memory (from blakjak :-):

 

"There are three kinds of hands played at matchpoints.

• weird distributions, crazy splits, et al, machine-dealt: 'those [deleted] computer hands again.'
  
• weird distributions, crazy splits, set al, hand-dealt: 'boy, the hands are really wild tonight, aren't they?'
  
• flattish hands, nice breaks, doesn't matter who dealt: 'well, that was a fun game. We on for next week?'
  

 

and yes, the third option is more prevalent with hand-dealt boards (although provided players shuffle their cards before putting them away the last time, surprisingly little more prevalent), due to insufficient shuffling by a majority of the players who still want to hand-deal.

 

Anecdata: AFAICan remember, all my 13-card trump fits have been hand dealt.

[Vampyr]

They are everywhere I've been (unless they run out).

 

Unless you have multiple sections, there is not a lot of point in buying a dealing machine if you are not going to have hand records available.

[Siegmund]

Comparing costs on a like for like basis is not trivial. But these do not look remotely similar to me.

 

Not exactly the same, but in the same ballpark: in round figures, $4000 for a dealing machine, and $150 each for one to two dozen scoring machines (you need one on every table, in addition to the base station.)

 

Most small clubs in my area are on a close to break-even basis: that would represent a few years worth of saving up and fundraising, unless a generous member came forward with a big contribution to help make it happen right away. (That's the only reason the club I play at has them.)

 

Does anyone know of any club that has reverted from machine dealt hands to manually dealt hands

 

No, but the Swiss Teams at our annual tournament will be reverting. In addition to the great time commitment to make so many boards with one dealing machine, and the usual resistance to new change, we had many complaints about overhearing results from adjacent tables when an interesting board was in play.

[Trinidad]

Does anyone know of any club that has reverted from machine dealt hands to manually dealt hands?

I actually do. A little over ten years ago S:t Erik, the largest bridge club in Sweden (and probably the largest face to face bridge club in the world), stopped using machine dealt hands for their team games. (They kept using them for the pairs games.)

 

There were two reasons:

- results could be overheard from other matches that were playing the same boards.

- the cross-IMP scores seemed to lead to tensions within teams.

 

The decision to stop with machine dealt hands for teams was pretty controversial at the time. I do not know whether they use machine dealt hands for their team games today, but I can't find hand records for their team games on their website (and they do have them for their pairs games).

 

Rik

[barmar]

Most small clubs in my area are on a close to break-even basis: that would represent a few years worth of saving up and fundraising, unless a generous member came forward with a big contribution to help make it happen right away. (That's the only reason the club I play at has them.)

That's essentially how our small club (one game/week, around 8 tables) did it. A few years ago the club director bought the Duplimate, and the club has been paying him back slowly.

[mycroft]

For the bridgemates, our unit subsidised purchasing of servers and table units; in exchange, when the unit or district runs a tournament, the clubs are required to loan the units back at no charge.

 

Unfortunately, our unit considers the dealer and the benefits it will give us is lower than the cost of doing that (and perhaps the chance of recovering it by making board sets for clubs); so we lag behind there.

[rmnka447]

Both a dealer and electronic scoring have benefits, but the dealer which allows providing hand records probably is more important.

 

My brother runs the two bridge games in the town where he lives. He typically has about ten tables a session.

 

He started out by purchasing the electronic scoring (bridgepads) first. It took a while for the players to learn to use the devices, but as people got used to them, it markedly speeded up the game. The info entered includes the contract, the result, and the opening lead. It seems like the player population really liked that results were available almost as soon as the game was over and the consistently shorter total time for the games. The club was also able to unload the results on line which eliminated a lot of the printing out of results. One unforeseen benefit is the ability of the devices to accommodate just about any movement or game efficiently. Something like a Club Swiss event is much easier to do and doesn't drag out like it normally does when run manually.

 

Getting a dealer was more difficult because of costs. They included not only the dealer, but dealer compatible boards, new cards, etc. He ultimately was able to finance the dealer by raising the entry fees from $4 to $6. The players, of course, grumbled but there wasn't a big drop off in attendance. It took about a year for him to accumulate enough to purchase the dealer.

 

In the interim, he was able to work a deal with a club about 30 miles away to produce sets of boards with their dealer. One of the players at his club regularly played at this other club and agreed to transport sets of boards back and forth for free entries. The other club was also paid something like $10 a set to produce the pre-dealt hands.

 

There were the usual complaints about the pre-dealt hands, but the big benefit was in being to provide hand records. This provided a means for players to review the hands. Even better, the pre-dealt hand records were uploaded along with all the results from each board (contract, score and opening lead) to the results section of the ACBL website. So players can see how they and everyone else did on the board. Newer players interested in improving especially like this as it provides a way to analyze and learn from their results.

 

The dealer has since been purchased and the entry fees reduced by a dollar.

[JanM]

Unless you have multiple sections, there is not a lot of point in buying a dealing machine if you are not going to have hand records available.

 

Of course it is possible to post hand records online instead of, or in addition to, printing them. At the USBCs, I got tired of throwing out reams of paper and now print hand records "on demand" instead of printing a vast number and tossing most of them. Although there are a significant number of players who ask for them, many people actually prefer to get them online. I don't know whether that would be true at an average bridge club or not - obviously they wouldn't have the bidding and play records available online as the USBC players do, thanks to Vugraph :) .

[blackshoe]

Unless you have multiple sections, there is not a lot of point in buying a dealing machine if you are not going to have hand records available.

They're not cheap. We have a game here that routinely runs in excess of 30 tables. Sometimes they have 40. Should we provide 160 hand records for that game, every time, just in case they have 40 tables? What if they have 42? While hand records can be "available" you often can't have enough for everyone, unless you want to increase the table fees by a couple of bucks - a prospect the players will not appreciate. Then you get into "we increased the table fee so we could have enough hand records for everybody, and now half the players don't even show up."

[Vampyr]

They're not cheap. We have a game here that routinely runs in excess of 30 tables. Sometimes they have 40. Should we provide 160 hand records for that game, every time, just in case they have 40 tables? What if they have 42? While hand records can be "available" you often can't have enough for everyone, unless you want to increase the table fees by a couple of bucks - a prospect the players will not appreciate. Then you get into "we increased the table fee so we could have enough hand records for everybody, and now half the players don't even show up."

 

See above. You can have hand records available online, and/or print them out only for those who want them.

 

Edit: but anyway if you have all those tables you will have multiple sections, and you could have overall winners if everyone played the same hands.

[mycroft]

I agree; for 40 tables, I'd print 100 records (+/- depending on my knowledge of my audience). If they run out, I'd tell people "the records will be posted online with the results" and that usually removes 90% of the issue (it doesn't save the bar people, but enough at that table will have paper records that the one or two that missed them will be able to look over someone's shoulder).

 

I would expect that if it's the game I'm thinking of, there are multiple sections, but it's flighting rather than big - a 26 or 27 table web in A, 10 or so in B, and a 0-small game with a few tables. So scoring across the field is not necessary/undesireable. Having said that, making up three sets of boards by hand (never mind 5) so you can have the web movement (and therefore, everyone playing the same hands) is tedious.

[barmar]

Getting a dealer was more difficult because of costs. They included not only the dealer, but dealer compatible boards, new cards, etc. He ultimately was able to finance the dealer by raising the entry fees from $4 to $6. The players, of course, grumbled but there wasn't a big drop off in attendance. It took about a year for him to accumulate enough to purchase the dealer.

Modern dealing machines work with standard cards. They also work with ordinary boards, but you have to transfer the hands from the machine to the board by hand, so it's a bit more work for whoever is running it.

[rmnka447]

Modern dealing machines work with standard cards. They also work with ordinary boards, but you have to transfer the hands from the machine to the board by hand, so it's a bit more work for whoever is running it.

 

It's much faster to have the dealer compatible boards which open up and let the dealer deal directly into the board. Also, the dealer is able to recognize which board has been placed into the dealer and deal the appropriate hand into it. If I recall correctly, my brother said it takes about 20-25 minutes to do a complete set of boards in this manner. Additionally, you may want to have several sets of boards, so you can prepare ahead of time for several games in one sitting.

 

Yes, you can use regular boards but that means you have to make sure that the hand dealt gets into the right board another potential source of errors. And it does mean more manual handling of the boards and cards.

[Vampyr]

Also, the dealer is able to recognize which board has been placed into the dealer and deal the appropriate hand into it.

 

Wow I have never seen this. With the Duplimate you have to put in the boards in order.

[rmnka447]

Wow I have never seen this. With the Duplimate you have to put in the boards in order.

I believe with the dealers here, you put a small decal with the board number on the side of the board and the dealer is able to read it. It makes everything a whole lot simpler and efficient.

[blackshoe]

See above. You can have hand records available online, and/or print them out only for those who want them.

 

Edit: but anyway if you have all those tables you will have multiple sections, and you could have overall winners if everyone played the same hands.

I didn't say we don't have everyone play the same hands, I said we often don't have enough pre-printed hand records for everyone.

 

You seem to be suggesting that the club owner should print out hand records on the fly, perhaps with a base that is not quite sufficient for all who want hand records. The problem with that is that it would require the club owners to do something they don't now do and therefore do not want to do. Plus in some cases it would require investment in a better printer than the one they have - and must lug around to games where there is no convenient place to set them up permanently, which is certainly the case with our biggest game.

 

Online availability is fine, except that not everyone has a computer, and even some of those who do have no clue how to use it beyond reading their email (if that).

[mycroft]

I would recommend for 40 tables (frankly, for more than about 6) that whatever HRs they run up they run up at a print shop, not on their club printer. $.16/HR (what Staples wants to charge me, possibly before an up to 20% business discount) is significantly cheaper than printing yourself (Staples wants to charge $.99/doublesided print - clearly that's with overhead and profit margin, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's pushing 50, 60 cents on a 'home printer').

 

I would never run hand records on the fly unless I ran out and people really objected.

[sfi]

I would recommend for 40 tables (frankly, for more than about 6) that whatever HRs they run up they run up at a print shop, not on their club printer. $.16/HR (what Staples wants to charge me, possibly before an up to 20% business discount) is significantly cheaper than printing yourself (Staples wants to charge $.99/doublesided print - clearly that's with overhead and profit margin, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's pushing 50, 60 cents on a 'home printer').

 

I would never run hand records on the fly unless I ran out and people really objected.

 

Our club prints them on the fly for much less than that. The running cost is about $.01/page on a commercial office printer.

[Siegmund]

It's much faster to have the dealer compatible boards which open up and let the dealer deal directly into the board.

 

I would correct that to "it's a tiny bit faster," to the tune of something like 10 seconds per board or 5 minutes per set.

 

You rapidly lose all those time savings and then some, the first few times cards spill out of the boards that open. We not only had the occasional board open up, but very frequently had a few cards fall out of the pockets while being passed because the board had an extra millimeter of slack in it. By "frequently" I mean on the order of once every other round -- several times per session, every time we used those boards, until people learned to handle them very gingerly. We still own the boards, and reluctantly use them when we need extra boards for a special event or we have to deal a whole weeks' worth in advance, but it is our very strong recommendation NOT to buy the dealer-compatible boards.

[Vampyr]

I would correct that to "it's a tiny bit faster," to the tune of something like 10 seconds per board or 5 minutes per set.

 

You rapidly lose all those time savings and then some, the first few times cards spill out of the boards that open. We not only had the occasional board open up, but very frequently had a few cards fall out of the pockets while being passed because the board had an extra millimeter of slack in it. By "frequently" I mean on the order of once every other round -- several times per session, every time we used those boards, until people learned to handle them very gingerly. We still own the boards, and reluctantly use them when we need extra boards for a special event or we have to deal a whole weeks' worth in advance, but it is our very strong recommendation NOT to buy the dealer-compatible boards.

 

These boards work fine in EBU events and in English clubs. It's true that cards can fall out when you are passing the boards, but if I have found that if you give it a bit of spin, like a frisbee, the cards will not fall out.

[gordontd]

If I recall correctly, my brother said it takes about 20-25 minutes to do a complete set of boards in this manner.

My experience is more like 10 minutes for a set of 32, unless the machine is in need of servicing.

[mycroft]

While commercial office printer is the golden goal, if lugging the "portable laser printer" to the site every week is already a problem, commercial office printer requires "requesting access" from one's real job, very likely; that's why I quoted commercial prices vs. home printer (with the 'we own you, you're going to bleed on the toner' SOP).

[Finch]

... He ultimately was able to finance the dealer by raising the entry fees from $4 to $6....

 

The dealer has since been purchased and the entry fees reduced by a dollar.

 

That's a good way to raise the entry fees by a dollar...

[McBruce]

My experience is more like 10 minutes for a set of 32, unless the machine is in need of servicing.

 

Are you counting the time it takes to remove 32 decks of cards from the boards? With old-style metal boards I am lucky if I can average 20-25 minutes per set of 36 in a tournament week. With the Dealer4 machines dealing boards every 5.5 seconds I don't believe the people who say they can multitask and strip and load at the same time. There are rumours that the local district is finally going to spring for more boards and buy the ones that open up, so we'll see how that goes...

 

I actually voted for scoring machines first. Duplicating machines introduce never-ending extra costs:

 

--hand record and summary printing and web posting

--cards fade and become unreadable and need to be replaced more often

--the machine itself will need occasional servicing

--a club with multiple games will soon find it wants to have more sets of boards, so that they can be pre-made further in advance

--directors end up duplicating the boards and have to arrive much earlier to do so, something which many will not happily do for free

 

Beyond hand records, there are other advantages of the duplicating machine. My games never see boards 28 or higher, I make two sets of 1-27 and Web movements ensure that all play the same boards unless there is a sitout. With 17+ I sometimes use the 28-36 to avoid sharing, but that can be arranged as the game begins.

 

I don't know how much memory the scoring units have inside them, but one excellent feature would be the ability to send each scoring machine the game results when a game ends, and have a set up so that a player could use any idle scoring machine to check results and see hand records for the boards he is interested in at any time. These days memory is cheap and the machines should be able to save and display game information for at least, say, ten days. This would cut down HUGELY on the amount of paper and toner clubs go through. In addition to hand records, many ACBL players (even those who can access the results online and see what happened at EVERY table) still demand "summary" sheets with their matchpoints and results only, sometimes two copies so both partners can have one. Most people look at the four or five hands they are interested in and ignore the rest, making this basically a colossal waste of toner and paper. Of the 8-20 pages I print each game, there are usually 4-6 of them that don't make it out the door. Imagine being able to go to any idle scoring device and access results from the game just finished, or two days ago, or even last week. What would it take, maybe 1MB of cheap memory in each $120 unit to save a forest? Make it happen, BridgeMate!