As I say each Monday at Brighton, these events test corners of the scoring system that do not get used for the rest of the year. The scoring also tests the scorers — they must remember to use the rarely used features and how to use them. The “Play With The Experts” Pairs (PWTE, not PTFE) requires two unusual features: preset butler datums and multisection two winner (mitchells). This year we also had an early bird section starting upstairs at 19:00 that had to be merged with the two downstairs sections, which started at 19:45.
Yesterday the poor scorer had a late finish: there was a score change in the open teams just as I was about to upload the results to the internet. Relaunching the TeamsScorer program while the FTP process was trying to connect threw the machine in to a complete tiz. I would press a button and nothing would happen for 90s, so I would wander off to the open pairs to help finalising those results. Eventually I managed to print a new ranking list but then I tried turning it off and on again, a process which itself took forever. It was an hour after the end of the event when the printer finally delivered the revised cross-table results and I could go to the bar.
Tonight was an even later finish. We had introduced a rover into the 15-table white section (playing a web mitchell movement). Unfortunately we ended up with EW pair numbers that did not match any of the movements we could easily generate: we need to substitute a new movement with the same pair numbers with the extra rover pair in the movement, so we could then edit the rover pair into the travellers. So we had to edit a new movement file, load the new movement, re-read the scores, edit the travellers so the rover pair played the boards they played, and then add the weighted adjustments that had been lost be re-reading the scores. We finally printed a ranking list and displayed it on the notice boards ready for the player to read bright and early in the morning.
It was too late even to go the bar.
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