Virtual Game Start Issue

[McBruce]

Our games are 20-board BBO-Howells, ten rounds of two, unless we have fewer than eleven pairs (with 11 we add a sub to make 12).

 

Today as gametime approached we had 11 pairs and one on the partnership desk. No problem until I got the notice that someone was offline. I messaged the partner and checked and after a few minutes decided I would have to boot the pair. However...

 

Booting the pair would start the tournament with only 10 pairs and move it to an 18-board Howell. So I announced a short delay, added three more minutes to the start time first, then booted offline pairs (there was only one, sometimes you find out there are several), getting us back down to 10, then went back to tournament setup, changed to 3-board rounds, 7-rounds, 6 minutes per round, went back to the main screen and killed off the extra time, then clicked 'modify.' The tournament began: but 9 rounds of 2, not 7 rounds of 3.

 

I expect my mistake was that I should have clicked modify after changing the round/time/boards parameters, then gone back in and deleted the extra time and clicked modify again. But (assuming this is the problem) an improvement would be for the system to check for parameter changes before starting the tournament. It doesn't seem intuitive for the system to start without checking for parameter changes first when the time runs out. It's #18763 if someone wants to check into it.

 

(As usual, the player offline claims not to have been offline, which has happened before with this player. We could also use a siren to go off for people who stray to other parts of BBO that the system sees as offline....)

[patr1cks]

I think this once happened to me and it was because although I changed to 7 rounds of 3 boards, I forgot to correct 20 boards to be 21 boards. Any inconsistency seems to trigger the system into choosing its own movement.