Brighton Days 9 and 10 - lost weekend

Mentioning my boot in this blog, while wearing my boot at Brighton, has allowed a few more people to put a face to the blogger. If you look on the back page of Sunday's “Brighton Focus” (the daily bulletin) you can see my face in profile: photograph by VixTD.

Saturday flew by: not much time between sessions for the scorers but we did get the evening session scores merged and determined the qualifiers for the final before midnight. Scoring in the playing area and running past midnight can mean competing with the noise from the speedball while performing the (sometimes complex) tie-break procedures to determine the qualifiers.

Scoring the finals on Sunday started with typing in the movement data; surely anyone can type in the movement for eight teams in 7 rounds, someone said later. I agreed that was easy but checking that what you have typed has no errors and will not bring the event to a shuddering halt in round 3 is harder, and takes longer. The movement data was OK and the finals went easily for 6 rounds, except for one incident of less than best behaviour at bridge. But in the last round, bluejak had two rulings at the same table between two teams in contention. We were mentally preparing for appeals and a late finish but nothing happened.

One ruling was a hesitation blackwood (bluejak suggests “BIT-wood”) auction where we ruled that a 2NT opener could pass a sign-off with 3 aces (having showen O or 3). The other ruling was a more complicated misinformation ruling and the result was a weighted score: a lot of a profitable sacrifice and a little of the table result, a making game. The first ruling was a slam swing but the second only swung one IMP because the result at the other table was a making slam.

The finals and the final tidying up was finished in time to relax over a vegetarian meal at Food for Friends: an annual event.

Today's missing link: Fours Stars “B” Final data.

So long, and thanks

Brighton - some days later

I feel a bit like Arthur Dent, on his return to his old life on Earth:

Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably easy. People had such extraordinarily short memories, including him. Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped from the TV and now kept in the back of a cupboard without bothering to watch.

So long, and thanks for all the fish, Douglas Adams

Ten days at Brighton isn't eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy, but it is more intense than life at home.

Its all coming back to haunt us

The rulings from Brighton are coming back to haunt us all over the internet. It is sad to see that bad behaviour is still a problem: I think the TDs are still finding it difficult to be both firm and fair when dealing with bad behaviour; but I am sure the bulk of the problems are not reported to us. There were also problems with WBF convention cards, foreign (including Scottish) players who were forced to fill in EBU convention cards then find the local players do not have appropriately completed convention cards; I wonder if the Scottish players offered to use SBU cards, they look close enough to EBU style.

Health-wise I survived Brighton remarkably well. Considering I could not do a couple of days work per week, six months ago: I managed 10 days of up to 12 hours work a day, with midnight to 3am drinking, posting results on the internet, or blogging. My foot survived but did need a lot of care, attention and rest.

Controlling my vegetarian/diabetic diet is difficult when eating out all the time, but there is a good range of vegetarian/ethnic resturants in Brighton. The hotel resturant provided soya milk for breakfast but on the last Sunday I accidently had milk on my cereal and suffered lactose intolerance symptoms for the week after. (You do not want to know!)

It's my birthday today: half the family went to work and I had an appointment at the orthotists to collect some new shoes! (See Best foot forward.)