Midnight Speedball

Brighton - Day 8

For me, today's sessions were:

13:00-16:30

Final afternoon open pairs, 35 tables: I was scorer but took some rulings.

20:00-23:30

First session of the Swiss Teams, 106 teams in the main room: TD (first time for a week).

00:00-01:30

Midnight Speedball Pairs, 9 tables: I was TD i/c and scorer.

The midnight speedball events have a great atmosphere: there is time to play serious bridge as well as engaging in some banter. The pairs events (on Friday, Wednesday and Friday) usually play 26/27 boards in 90 minutes. The teams events (Swiss or KO) on the Saturdays are a bit longer because of the manual processing of assignments.

For the pairs we use Bridgemates so the results are available when the last score is finished. Tonight there was less than 0.5 match points separating first and second as the last board was being completed (fractional match points because the incomplete board was being factored). When the result was entered first and second had switched places (again) and the margin was a whole 2 match points. Lots of the players were gathered round the computer screen to watch the last result.

There was also two pairs from a family in my home city, playing as father & son and mother & daughter. Another player offered the son some jelly babies and was accused of "grooming".

One table was playing so fast they were given extra boards, just for fun. They (specifically NS) managed an extra board on 5 of the 9 rounds, so in fact NS played all the prepared 32 boards in 90 minutes.

The TDs are almost solely engaged in dealing with slow play: mainly by cagolling players, moving boards and entering missing scores. There are no real rulings: if there is a book ruling, the TD picks a likely option for the non-offending side and tells the players to get on with it; there are no penalties, except fines are always possible.