Preempting the WBF and the ACBL

[Zelandakh]

Some thoughts:

- You do not need lots of rooms for this to work. You need 2 large rooms instead of one with 2 players seated at each table.

- One simple solution would be to keep everything basically as it is but put a monitor in front of the seats of the missing 2 players. These screens would display the bids made and cards played of the players and would be alerted in the normal way. There is no need to display the whole hand or force players to adjust to the different feel of playing at a single screen.

- Having a microphone + loudspeaker available to be used between hands would take care of some issues relating to communication.

- If this sort of format were successful then the next step might be to go to a BBO-style interface but I think you get the main advantages with such a limited implementation and it is not such a leap for the players.

- It is perfectly sensible for club play to be fully social and international play to be fully electronic, in the same way that much club and junior tennis is played without line judges or an umpire but such would be unthinkable at Wimbledon or in the US Open.

- The use of databases is an interesting idea but probably impractical for human play at the current time.

[Vampyr]

Some thoughts:

- You do not need lots of rooms for this to work. You need 2 large rooms instead of one with 2 players seated at each table.

 

Well, now you are in the same room as one of your teammates, plus you can hear explanations from other tables... no, you would really need four rooms per match.

[Zelandakh]

Well, now you are in the same room as one of your teammates, plus you can hear explanations from other tables... no, you would really need four rooms per match.

Depends if we are talking pairs or teams, no? ;) Would you settle for twice as many as required playing with screens?