...another thread that has morphed past its title...
jillybean, on 2012-April-02, 18:03, said:
Thanks great information, I knew nothing about board movements. I've got to wonder why we don't do something
smarter with our boards here, McBruce?!
It might have something to do with the fact that in District 19, the same person (me) is responsible for producing Daily Bulletins, putting the Bulletins and results pages on the web, and preduplicating all the deals for the pair games ... and that there are only 24 hours in a day.
Most players here tend to read a lot into the words "Swiss Teams." They expect caddies, shuffling each round, the occasional round-robin (but they are prepared to storm the TDs table if they are made to play two of them), but not hand records. It took the better part of two decades for us to remove the terms "winning tie" and "losing tie" from the vocabulary. It will take a similar time, assuming we start now, to teach players that it's a 7 or 8-board match but they only get two to start, they'll get the boards they need eventually (some might be a different colour), and that it is important to pass boards as soon as they've played them, instead of dropping them on the floor or putting them under the other boards (usually upside-down so they don't accidentally replay them). Trying to make this sea change now simply results in chaos and anger. I know, I've tried, and quite frankly I'm tired of the abuse I get from players who want things as they've always been until they die.
I think the compromise at the moment for District 19's Regionals is that some of the AX Swisses are running preduplicated boards for the second session, if you are in the top four or five matches (just which matches actually are the top four or five, is a guess -- the results do not come out simultaneously in an ACBL Swiss: ACBLScore matches pairs with similar scores when results are entered). For these AX Swisses they ask me to preduplicate four or five complete sets of 32 for four 8-board matches. In reality, if the players would stop complaining about anything new (or, more likely, blaming it, when their results are not as good as they'd hoped), we could preduplicate two sets of eight for each round to cover the top four matches. But the district has already spent over $5K on two duplicating machines (which for some reason cannot cross the US-Canada border), more extra money to ensure there are enough sets of boards at tournaments (preduplicating in advance requires more boards), and more extra money to compensate me for what I assure you is a very difficult and exhausting week, one which pays me less than directing would. In Penticton last year (a 3200-table Regional) I preduplicated over 120 36-board sets in six days, sometimes eight hours of work, AFTER an overnighter of preparing Daily Bulletins and posting results to the web. Oh yes, and I was sick as a dog all week, too. Adding Swiss Teams to the list of events that are preduplicated would require even more board sets (along with our suppliers entire stock, we needed eight sets of Vancouver's boards last year to have enough) and would require more trained operators to do the job.
At local sectionals we face pretty much the same problem: we need someone else to do the duplicating. I can handle the 12-16 sets for pair games that we need on a sectional weekend by making about half of them in advance and the other half on Saturday morning and between sessions. But during a weekend where I am directing 4-7 sessions, that's about all I can do. For a 40-table Swiss we would need ten sets of boards and significant time to preduplicate them, once for each session. We have just that many sets, but 5-8 of them are in use until we leave on Saturday night. Someone (not me) could come in very early on Sunday morning and preduplicate ten sets of 1-8 in about an hour or so. If they got the first three or four matches preduplicated before the game began, they would probably be able to keep up. But now you have more complications. What if ten extra teams show up? What do we do when inevitably someone shuffles and one-quarter of the room follows suit before we figure out what's happening? How are we going to handle the huge job of picking up all the boards from all the tables AND putting out the next rounds' worth, in that hectic time when we are waiting forever for the final team to report? I have tried this at the club level in a smaller one-session team game (or Swiss Pairs) at the club, and the collecting of the boards and putting out of the next ones can be a daunting task.
Another reason we in this area of the world have not embraced the duplicating machine as much as other areas is that our local supplier makes very nice quality old-style metal boards in beautiful colours that last. Understandably, neither he nor the district is interested in replacing these with the new type that is inserted into the duplicating machine, saving the operator time. When I have to both unload the cards and reload them one hand at a time, the best I can do, and it took a lot of practice to get this far, is about 100 boards an hour. Probably with the newer duplicate boards this can be improved to 125-150 per hour. Although I must admit that I wonder about these boards that open up so the cards can drop into them. Do they last as long as metal boards do? Hinges tend to wear out over time. Ask anyone who ever owned a dot-matrix printer (another feature of ACBL tournaments).
You really need to give the District time to adapt. They are looking at this new acquisition and noting that it is costing them a fair chuck of money, and while people who play pair games at tournaments appreciate it, it is not exactly producing more revenue in terms of increased attendance, at least not yet. Hand records in team games are not something you can wave a magic wand at and make happen: a combination of player resistance to new things, significant extra costs in equipment and operator labour for the organizers, and understandable resistance by Directors of new and potentially disastrous ways of organizing games, all create some large obstacles.
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