16 August 2013

Brighton Day 6 / Day 7 - knees up

Upstairs/downstairs events on Tuesday led to knee problems for the poor scorer but it now feels like we are over the worst for Brighton.

The Mixed Pivot Teams was complicated as ever but seemed to go smoothly, although we continue to have BridgeMate configuration problems. There were also awkward rulings and talk of several appeals — one of which happened. Some players and appeals committees seem to expect the TDs to do extensive player-polling before giving any judgement ruling; but in some events polling can be difficult to organise and can take up a lot of time for the TD — time they could be dealing with other incidents/rulings.

Wednesday was sufficiently less 'full on' than Tuesday, that I stayed to do scoring for the Midnight Speedball and I played one board for the winning pair. The speedball went to time and we had results on the internet and photographs of the winners by 1:35am.

Thursday involved more BrigeMate configuration problems in both the afternoon and evening sessions. There was other problems in the evening Mixed Pairs, with one player unable to continue playing, due to 'illness', which meant a change to the movement. Nevertheless, the operation to merge the earlybird session with main session data while the main session was still in play was again successful.

The biggest outstanding problem in scoring is the Play With The Experts: the masterpoints have the unique combination of two winner movement, stratification, and a mixture of green/blue points. Any pair of those issues would be problematic but the combination of all three involves iterated construction of a spreadsheet with all the constituent masterpoints, and the spreadsheet has to be rebuilt by hand every time we find a problem with the previous data.

The masterpoints for the Mixed Pairs is a combination of stratification and a mixture of green/blue points: so I left that for Friday morning and we were back at our hotel until midnight. Unfortunately, the bar was open and an early night was avoided — instead the TD tradition of 'a bit after' 2am was observed.

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