Gérard Neuberg

Gérard Neuberg of the Neuberg formula has died.

There is a short obitury (in French) in the FFB magazine.

EBU Panel Weekend

The EBU TD panel consists of those TDs the EBU will use to direct at its events, including trainees who serve a probationary period before “donning the purple” blazer, or not. (We no longer have purple/maroon blazers, so I guess it should be “donning the red polo”). Every two years, the panel meets for a weekend away to share best practice and remind ourselves how to sit in a bar until “a bit after two”. Some topics come up two-year after two-year, and a workable and consistent approach to Law 27 is such a topic.

One more go at Law 27 (2007)

It is getting to the stage the new Law 27 is no longer new and in a few years will become the old Law 27. We (EBU TDs) continue to oscillate about what the different players at the table should be told about the options available to the offender in replacing his insufficient bid. I think the truth is that we do things differently depending on the auction and the experience of the players at the table. We also continue to discuss particular cases of what calls constitute “rectification calls” under Law 27B1(b) — that is, calls that will not silence offender's partner. Here again we oscillate between a more or less liberal interpretations of the law. But there seem to be nothing much to be learnt as general principle, but just to look at each case separately.

The case we looked at was 1NT –(3♦)– 2NT; with responder holding ♥AJxxxxx. The point of the exercise was to distinguish the application of Law 27D (after Law 27B1) from the application of Law 23 (after Law 27B2). But we had to know whether a replacement bid of 3♥ would silence partner.

Responder intended 2NT as Lebensohl but was confused about what auction he thought he was bidding Lebensohl in, so it was not clear if his intended 1NT –(2X)– 2NT – 3♣ – 3♥ was to play or invitational. It was also not clear whether the partnership had an agreement as to whether 1NT –(3♦)– 3♥ was invitational or forcing. So we were forced to conclude that 3♥ as a replacement for the insufficient bid did not necessarily have the same meaning as 3♥ after the insufficient Lebensohl and so did not have the same-or-more-precise meaning as the insufficient Lebensohl.

We concluded that 3♥ would only be a non-silencing replacement bid, if responder knew what strength of 3♥ bid (to play, invitational or forcing) he was intending to show via Lebensohl, if the partnership (in particular, opener) knew what strength was shown by the proposed 3♥ bid, and if those two meanings (in terms of strength) co-incided. This all requires a lot of investigation by the TD during a live auction, possibly wanting to ask questions of both members of the non-offending side independently and without giving information to other players to which they may not be entitled.

WBF have another go with Law 27 (2017)

Meanwhile (in another part of the forrest) the WBF laws draft subcommittee are considering how to fix/improve this law. Any radical redrafting has been rejected: for instance suggestions that the insufficient bid should be an unauthorised withdrawn call (see open season on law 27). It is possible that the “meaning” of the insufficient bid, instead of being the “intended” meaing, becomes the “apparent” meaning (or the information conveyed by the insufficient bid). So the TD does not need to ask the offender what he was trying to do, instead he has to decide what it looks like he was trying to do. It is also possible that any unauthorised information generated by the offender (for example, “oops, I thought he had passed”) will be wound in to the restrictions on offender's partner.

We shall have to wait patiently and see what happens.

Coming up

So, there may not be much more to say here on Law 27 for a few years. At the panel weekend, I lead a session on scoring and we (again) recognised the value of sharing our experiences with the different scoring systems. So I might try and write up some details of scoring system problems and achievements over the last year and post them here.

Brighton 2014 - weak one

More ramblings and some deliberate puns/typos from the last seven daze.

The first weekend was intense: I was scoring all sections from one computer. The computer was networked to another computer on the balcony with its own bridgemate server and large display screen. The results from upstairs were collected on the upstairs computer and written to the database on the master computer; and the rolling scores were displayed on both floors. Everything worked but the computers did run a bit slowly at times – database access over ethernet is just not the same as accessing a database on the same computer.

We kicked off with ruling and appeals from the off: the first appeal related to a ruling in match one. During the midweek events there have been less actual appeals but lots of threats and “french” appeals (haranguing anyone who has to listen about how unfair it all is).

RIP: Robin Williams, a clown who couldn't live any more; Lauren Bacall, a goddess who should have lived forever.

...

and then I went to look at the end of Friday point-a-board teams scoring and got involved in fixing the pianola uploads; and then setting up the networked computers for the Swiss Teams; and before you know it, it was another 1:00am finish.

Brighton Day 9 - things fall apart

Session 2 of the Swiss Teams was when multi-section Australia movement really kicked in. During the session the teams had a new team number which was the same as their new home/NS table number, but the overall results were expressed in terms of their initial team number. The BridgeMates use the 'in session' number whereas the scoring program used (mainly) the initial team number. This was all new for everyone but players/TDs/scorers got the hang of it after a couple of rounds.

I scored the first session of the day, which was interesting when the computer screen failed before the start of play. We could still attach a monitor and use that to duplicate the desk top — so we could copy the data files. Copying the data files to a spare computer and we were able to resume before play started.

In the evening, I had a session off from scoring — although I was involved as 'assistant to the scorer'. I had unauthorised information rulings in both sessions: whether I was TD or scorer. In both cases, it was clear there were logical alternatives but the real question was what was suggested by the disallowed information from partner.

A more interesting ruling involved 14 exposed cards during the auction period. The TD made a ruling that allowed played to continue (with fewer penalty cards). One side had just been on the club TD course, the other side included a number of national referees: and both sides thought the ruling was wrong!

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.

Brighton Day 5 - Upstairs and downstairs

A busy day: arrived at 10am to set up a fourth scoring computer, left after 12:30am when I had to redo the internet uploads. These were the days events:

U25 Pairs	Upstairs	12:00-15:15 and 15:45-18:45
Open Pairs	Downstairs	14:00-17:30
Seniors Pairs semi-finals	Downstairs	14:00-17:30
Pairs Trophy (early bird)	Upstairs	19:00-22:30
Pairs Trophy	Downstairs	19:45-23:15
Seniors Pairs finals	Downstairs	19:45-23:15

I had fifteen minute outside the venue for dinner while the U25 Pairs was finishing: ten minutes waiting for chips to be cooked and five minutes eating them in a shelter on the promenade.

The hairiest point of the day was merging the early bird Pairs Trophy data in with the other sections, while the main event was still in progress. This meant the competitors could watch complete scolling results as the last boards were played and the results were final as soon as play was complete.

Brighton Day 4 - bridge missing

I had a half day: meaning I was only at the venue in the morning and evening. I spent the morning rearranging computer stations, copying files and generally setting up for scoring the midweek events. In the evening, the scoring went smoothly until it came to the master points: the combination of green points, blue points and stratification was too much for me and for the scoring programme; we went to bed and calculated the masterpoints in a spreadsheet in the morning.

During my afternoon off, I went to Shoreham by bus. We had a great aunt/uncle who lived in Shoreham and generations of my family have visited Shoreham (and the beach) since forever. My plan was to walk from the centre of town over the footbridge over the rive Adur and on to the beach beyond. The (old) footbridge was to me an iconic feature of Shoreham — so I was dismayed to see it has been replaced by a concrete and steel structure. Furthermore, the new bridge is still under construction, so my plans to recreate childhood memories were thwarted. (Hence the 'not bridge' label to this post.)

Back in Brighton, I was able to listen to some of the cricket but I missed all the action when England won the match and the Ashes.

Brighton Day 3 - Learn Something New

The Brighton Hub and Pianola is proving a success — so much so that we had to provide alternatives results because everyone wanted to access the results of the Swiss Pairs as soon as the event was finished and scored. Otherwise scoring the Swiss Pairs went smoothly, and bridge in the upstairs section was free of incident. There were more awkward incidents in the downstairs sections.

Scoring the evening's Open Pairs and Open Teams had its moments — the BrigeMates went live in the wrong events and players in the teams were able to enter some names before they were fixed. The upshot was that some players appeared to be playing in both the teams and the pairs until we checked against the names slips. The recurrent theme of scoring at Brighton is doing things that don't happen (very much) at any other event. This starts with the Sunday Open Teams were the movements are special and not always obvious for the scorer.

Rulings

There was time between scoring to give some rulings and to reflect on previous rulings. I had to rule on misbid or misexplanation when there had been a two-suited double in a strong 2♣ auction. I did not expect to find much support from the system card but there it was: it was not the exact sequence at the table but the fact that they had a documented method of two-suited calls was enough for me to rule misbid not misexplanation. The problem with mixing scoring and directing is that it is difficult to have time to discuss/explain rulings with players at the end of the session because you have to sort out the scores.

I discussed yesterday's misbid ruling with a TD colleague who is here as a player. The bracketed words in yesterday's blog 'absent any unauthorized information' came back to bite me. My colleague agreed that the failure to use the stop card before 2NT was evidence that opener had misbid but it was also unauthorised information to his partner. So his partner's action in not making a slam try should have been judged as a potential use of unauthorised information, not (just) as potential evidence of a concealed partnership understanding.

We also learnt that non-forcing responses when opponents have doubled are alertable — a change in the Blue Book from the Orange Book.

Brighton Day 1 - All dressed up and a way to go

New uniforms

The most obvious inovation at Brighton was the EBU TDs in their new uniform; out goes shirt and ties and maroon jackets — in with red polo shirts. The jackets had pockets that would fit a law book and note pad; as an alternative, a number of styles of ‘man’ bags are being sported. No pocket is big enough for the White Book, which I have printed and spiral bound, on display next to the scoring computer.

The Brighton Hub

The move is towards webifying the Brighton experience: less on paper — more on the web. The expectation is that all the results (and other player information) can be read on players' phones. The results are being displayed via Pianola. Of couse this means getting the results straight, and doing the assignments, before the poor scorer goes to bed. (This year, bed is in a different hotel — an interesting walk along the sea front through the drunken revelers.)

The Brighton Hub (on the EBU website) will also have articles that would have previously appeared in the bulletin. The ever popular TD Corner will appear there, so opportunities for more ramblings.

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.

Brighton Day 8 - emotional swings

The day started out sombre but finished with all the fun of the speedball

I had the afternoon off and this enabled me to travel to London for my godmother's funeral. This was an internment in a large North London cemetary, like something out of Dickens. The weather was great and we could listen in peace to the readings and prayers. (When you see these scenes played out in films, it is always raining.)

I arrived back in Brighton for the end of the afternoon session and was in time to do a final score correction and post the results to the internet. Then on to the main event with four sessions and two sections over two floors, and lots of scope for scoing issues. There were a number of disputes during the opening matches - this often happens at the start of a long Swiss Teams events.

Sorting out the scoring for the main event overlapped with the start of the Midnight Speedball pairs, which I was supposed to be in charge of. My colleagues rallied round to kick the event off and when I got there Gary had everything under control. During the speedball, Gary managed to pick up two appeals: one from the main event and one from the speedball itself (but both relating to alerting). I managed to get a “referee” from the bar, and the appeal from the speedball was resolved during playing time, with the referee talking to the players between rounds. Play finished in the regulation 90 minutes and results were available on the internet before 01:45. At some stage during the speedball I tripped over a glass: my foot was ok but the glass was unequal to the encounter with my boot!

Brighton Day 7 - being firm (but fair?)

Only one event this evening because the Seniors Congress has finished; and there were no appeals, late rulings, or score changes; so the event was scored and the results provided to the display boards, the internet and the bulletin, and we were in the bar, before midnight.

In the bar were several club TDs who had been on the four-day Club TDs; and those who did well were celebrating. One of the club TDs came over to talk to us and explained that there were people he wanted to avoid. This lead us on to the very important TD skill of being to tell people to go away firmly, while remaing polite.

As a TD or a scorer, one has to be available to the players when one if on duty. But there are times as a scorer when you need to left in peace and any queries an individual player may have have to be delayed for the greater good of producing a score for all the players. Such times include at the end of the event when a complicated event involves alot of operator input to fix the problems; and also in the middle of an event when the progress of the event while be compromised if scoring problems are not fixed.

Scoring v Philosophy

One example was. when we were dealing with introducing the rover pair and their results into the scoring of the Seniors Pairs Qualifier. A player came up to discuss how the overall winner of the “Play With The Experts” was determined. It became clear that they wanted to discuss the principle that should apply to determining the winner.

• “Has there been an error in the scores?” “No”
• “Has there been any failure to implement the conditions of contest?” “No”
• “Then perhaps you can leave us to sort out the other event and we can discuss the philophy of your event another time.”

Today's problems v yesterday's problems

Today we had problems with the scoring system during the first round of Seniors Swiss Teams. We were trying to understand the size of the problem and now much intervention was needed to recover all the scores. A player who was about to play in in the Open Pairs wanted to look at problem with the scores from the previous evening's Mixed Pivot Teams. I was trying to politely but firmly tell the player to come back in an hour when a colleague came to take details of the problem and promised to follow it up.

Lot of scratching of heads, printing of scores, and ticking boxes in the scores database eventually solved the problems in the Seniors Swiss Teams (with minimal impact on the players). When we came to catch up with the problem from the Mixed Pivot Teams, it turned out to be same problem that his opponents had raised earlier in the day. Despite both sides thinking there was an error, it turns out that both teams had made the same error in scoring up, and the scores we had were correct.

Brighton Days 5 and 6 - a bit busy

Two full days of scoring - setting up in the morning and then two events in the afternoon. There is little time betwen sessions - especially with early bird evening sessions - but I did manage to sit down to eat dinner today. Both evenings, there were late rulings and appeals, so into the wee small hours finalising the results and doing internet stuff.

Law 86D reared its ugly head - apparently we are back to giving an assigned adjustment when there are two non-offending side. I still think we should only be awarding a score that reflects the good result that was obtained at the table where a result was obtained, not attempting to reflect the good result they might have been obtained at the table where a result could not be obtained (or not a result untainted by extraneous infromation). But today we awarded a score that was about the biggest swing on the board that was obtained by any team in the event - surely that can not be right!

Missing links

• Seniors Swiss Teams (after 4 rounds)
• Wednesday Night Speedball (Pairs)

Brighton Day 4 - rage against the machine

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.

Application of Law 12C1(b) revisited

I have been called on a number of times recently to advise on the application of Law 12C1(b) — adjustment for non-offending side following self-inflicted damage, due to a SEWoG. I have written a spreadsheet to display the calculations (feedback welcome). As a consequence of writing the software, I now better understand the calculations and I have rewritten my article, which subsequently appeared in the EBU White Book.

Application of Law 12C1(b)

There are scores (for the non-offending side) we have to consider

1. the score for the Actual table result (including any serious error or WoGA)
2. the score for the result Before infraction (assigned by Law 12C1c)
3. the score for the result that Could have been scored, with the infraction but without serious error

The corresponding scores for the offending side are A', B', C'; at IMPs A' = −A, etc.; at match points A + A' = top, etc.

The overall damage D (= B − A) can be divided as

• Real damage: D_R = B − C
• Self-inflicted damage: D_S = C − A

There are four cases: all damage is self-inflicted, some is self-inflicted, no self-inflicted damage, or no damage at all.

• B ≤ A: no advantage, no damage, no adjustment;
• A < B ≤ C: all damage self-inflicted, no real damage D_R ≤ 0, NOS get A, OS get B';
• C ≤ A < B: no self-inflicted damage, D_S ≤ 0, balancing adjustment, NOS get B, OS get B';
• A < C < B: real damage and some self-inflicted.

In the final case, the OS get B' and the NOS get A + B − C = adjusted score − self-inflicted damage.

Examples

NS bid to 4H and EW “use UI” to compete to 4S, which is doubled. In defending 4SX, NS might revoke (a serious error) and lose a trick they would otherwise score. The result in the other room is NS +50. The expected result in 4H is making, so B (the result before the infraction) is +9 IMP for the non-offending side.

4SX-1 NS +100. Revoke

A = IMP(100-50) = +2 IMP. Without the revoke: 4SX-2 NS +300. C = IMP(300-50) = +6 IMP.

Damage D = 7 IMP; real damage D_R = 3 IMP, self-inflicted damage D_S = 4 IMP.

Offending side (team of EW) get −9 IMP, non-offending side (team of NS) get 2 + 9 − 6 = +5 IMP.

4SX-2 NS +300. Revoke

A = +6 IMP. Without the revoke: 4SX-3 NS +500. C = IMP(500-50) = +10 IMP. No real damage (D_R < 0).

Offending side get −9 IMP, non-offending side get +6 IMP (table result).

4SX-2 NS +300. No revoke

A = C = +6 IMP. No self-inflicted damage (D_S = 0). Both sides get ±9 IMP.

4SX-3 NS +500.

A = +10 IMP. No damage. Table result for both sides.

Speedball – don't drink and post

Brighton 2011 – Day 8 Midnight

A further post from Day 7 (evening), describing conflicts between being a scorer/TD in the playing area and acting as TD in-charge, has been held over until the dust has settled. Instead I am posting at 2am from a (deserted) hotel bar — ignoring advice to not drink and post/text/email.

I had the afternoon off and after sorting out some paperwork, I just had a nap and listened to the cricket. Then there were three matches of the Swiss Teams and not much of significance in terms of rulings. In the Blue/Yellow section we had problems with names in the SwissTeamsScorer — and we weren't even using bridgemates.

My last job of the day was to run the midnight speed-ball. We only had eight tables and played 24 boards in less than an hour and a quarter. Everything was posted, tidied, and put to bed before 01:30. This included a late-play: in round 1 table 1 did not know it was three board rounds and did not play board 3. So we had a one-table, 1 board, revenge round; and it was even possible for them entre the score on the bridgemate (and two other tables were still playing the real last round). The winning margin was 4% so I was able to announce the winners (to applause) while the last round was in progress.

The new “Jim” for the 21st century

Brighton 2011 – Day 7 Afternoon

In days gone by, when I was trainee and before, we all got taught how to assign and score Swiss Teams events. Jim had a set way of arranging assignment cards and writing assignments, and a whole colour-coded scheme for charting the scores. Since then, we have being using computers for charting, and then assigning, and now we can do the match scores with bridgemates.

While running the Seniors Congress Swiss Teams, yesterday and today, I have been teaching various colleagues how to use the scoring program with bridgemates for Swiss Teams; based on my experiences at Bournemouth and Torquay. I get the feeling that I am establishing common practice in the running of EBU Swiss Teams with bridgemates in a way that will filter through the ranks. Sarah suggests that this makes the “Jim” for the 21^st century.

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.

A difficult day

Brighton 2011 – Day 5

We had problems with players sat in the wrong sections, people getting upset, scorer errors, and scorer system errors; and then I ended up having to give a judgement ruling when I should have been checking the scores and printing results. All in all, not a good day.

And then the hotel Wi-Fi has been down most of the time, so even blogging has been difficult.

Posting from Brighton beach

Brighton - Day 8½

Morning off on the beach with free internet.

Those doing the speedball do not have to do any setup the following morning. In fact, I did go to the playing room and take down the scoring station I have been using all week. This is a lull before the final push: 56 boards of Swiss Teams today, 56 boards of Teams Final tomorrow, a quiet dinner at a vegetarian restuarant in The Lanes and then home on Monday.