Trials and Tribulations of the Brighton Midweek Scorer

Brighton 2011 – Day 6

Swiss Teams and Bridgemates

Everyone else runs Swiss Teams with Bridgemates with no trouble, but when the EBU does it there has been some trouble. At Easter we had to give up; and then at Bournemouth we had to stop and start again, but it worked from then on. The problem seems to revolve around reading players names (as EBU numbers) from the bridgemates. I tried again at the Riviera Congress in Torquay and although the names were not it the right places, everything ran OK.

So it was with some trepidation that we approached the Seniors Swiss Teams (session 1) this afternoon. There were lots of TDs to hand with different experiences of some of the previous problems, so we had every confidence. What happened was the same as Torquay, the names went in but half were in the wrong place, and some were lost. The names in the wrong place could be cut-and-pasted (as a block) to the right slots, and the remaining names typed from the name slips. It should all have appeared seamless to the players!

Dynamic Open Pairs

As the Swiss Teams finished match one, I had to run over to the afternoon's Open Pairs, to set up the movement. Just as I was about to hit the final “Yes” button, another pair turned up. Instead of one 25-table section, we were now two 13-table sections. I redid the movement, and new table numbers, boards and bridgemates were put out. Once some of the bridgemates had been successfully reconfigured we were up and running.

Then we tried to tell the bridgemates that there was a missing pair. We reread the results into the scoring program and it seemed to be picking up results from some previous session. The bridgemate controller programme got into a bit of tizz but continued to deliver the scores we wanted. We left it in its confused state and it got us through to the end of the session.

Mixed Pivot Teams

The highlight of the day was the EBU 75th Anniversary Mixed Pivot Teams. We had sixty teams and only had to have two goes at loading the correct movement before it all continued smoothly. Play runs at different speeds at different tables, and usually one round would not finish at one table before results were in for the next round from another table. This makes it almost impossible to produce clear round-by-round scores and ranking lists but we managed something. The results were out very quickly (after the last score was input) and the final results (after some more corrections) were out soon after.

All that remained was to re-sort 23 pairs at 13 tables into a workable movement for the midnight speed-ball, start the scoring system — and so to bed.