Swiss -- time between rounds ?

[Keene_JP]

The ACBL and BBO very recently made Swiss Teams an option for VIrtual CLubs. We ran one last Sunday -- went smoothly, but round 2 started immediately after round 1 etc. Our players are used to having time to sit with teammates to compare scores between rounds. With BBO doing all the comparisons and scoring this is no longer necessary -- but it is part of the basic "culture" of playing Swiss. Is there a way to achieve this? Will these hacks work in Swiss?

+break1+bduration=4+

That would force 4 minutes deadtime after round 1 during which (presumably) chatting to teammates would be possible. (Ideally, this would utilize a new choice for chat: "teammates" where what you say goes to the 3 others.)

If this hack does work, could TD, during round 2, edit the game description to change the hack to

+break2+bduration=4+

to similarly delay round 3? Or, would it be necessary to put all in the initial game setup:

+break1+bduration=4+ +break2+bduration=4+ +break3+bduration=4+

[steve23]

Hi - I recently directed Swiss Teams on BBO and was exceedingly disappointed to discover that the +break'nn'+ parameter does not function as you might hope or expect. Somewhat bizarrely, all it does is add 'nn' minutes to the clock time thus extending the length of playing time much to the confusion of the director, initially, and many of the players throughout. We were playing 10 board matches with 7 minutes a board and wanted a 5 minute break before the next match; what actually happens is BBO allocated 75 minutes (10B x 7M + 5M) to the first match then promptly started the second match, and so on. Scores become available for the first match just as the second match starts. Handling the lunch time break was a whole order of magnitude more ridiculous with no cumulative score or rank being available throughout the lunch time break. Whether BBO can resolve these (and other) very real practical issues with the Swiss Teams format remains to be seen - short of a major design rethink, I very much doubt it.

[DanMcGuire]

The last thing needed in an online Swiss is more time. I've been doing one with four boards per round and most tables sit for ten minutes after they've played while the one slow player in the group takes every last second on the clock.