[mike777]

Quote

It's then easy to see how much spare cash the club has, and decide whether you want to spend it on some new gadget.

great that is the main point yes?

btw if you dont pay the mort..ins ..taxes for your club...who does?

[mike777]

As you said, you have to decide how to spend your limited capital budget. Well, what else is a bridge club going to spend it on? The OP's situation was that they have enough money for either a duplicating machine or wireless scoring devices, but not both, so they're looking for advice on which one is preferable. What's so wrong with that? You don't need to make a spreadsheet for this decision



you dont?...you assume alot

in fact is seems a spreadsheet is perfect....just use important spreadsheats numbers..not crap....


If you dont know how to put important stuff into numbers...than that is the problem...yes?..not the spreadsheat

If you have a crappy algorithm ..then use a better one.

--

in any event dont waste money on something with ngative return

[mike777]

again what is the main question?


1) what is your return?
2) what do people want free?

iF THIS IS YOUR MONEY....OK.....YOU DECIDE...



AS THE OWNER you decide at some point...often with imperfect information

[blackshoe]

 barmar, on 2012-July-28, 21:48, said:

You take the travelers home, and enter everything when you get it fixed.

I still remember how to matchpoint by hand (although I'd have to think a little about factoring), but we no longer have any of those big score sheets where you enter all the matchpoints and add them up.

You can still buy them from Baron=Barclay. Also, you can create a spreadsheet with the same format. That's what I would do, assuming it was the scoring program and not the computer that was the problem.

[barmar]

 mike777, on 2012-July-29, 02:32, said:

btw if you dont pay the mort..ins ..taxes for your club...who does?

No one. Like I said, our club plays in a college classroom, it doesn't own any property. The cost of using the room is either free or very low, I don't remember.

Of the other nearby clubs, one plays in a church, one plays in an American Legion Hall, one is in a synagogue, and one rents space in an office building. I expect this latter one has the largest expenses for space, they're also probably the largest club in the Boston area (the Bridge Spot in Woburn).

[barmar]

 blackshoe, on 2012-July-29, 07:16, said:

You can still buy them from Baron=Barclay. Also, you can create a spreadsheet with the same format. That's what I would do, assuming it was the scoring program and not the computer that was the problem.

I know we CAN, but AFAIK we don't. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the director has some of them at home.

Our club doesn't have any storage space at the playing site, the director has to bring the supplies from home every time. So he only brings what's absolutely necessary.

[blackshoe]

One club here, the largest, has one afternoon game a week. They pay about $140 a session for rent in a synagogue. Two other clubs each have one game a week in another synagogue, where they pay (I think) about $100 a session. The fourth club has three games a week, and recently moved from the $140 place to the other one. "Club," for our English readers, has a different meaning than I think you're used to — our clubs don't have members, really, it's just pretty much the same people playing at all of them. They're usually owned by the person who directs, and are open to anyone who wants to pay the per-game card fee, currently about $7 per person. Table counts range from about 7 to around 30 or so. Most games run 10 to 15 tables.

The $100 place has been very generous with space - we have a room for the games, and two offices (one of which was originally a closet - no windows. We use it to store the boards, and the duplimate machine is set up there). The other place gave us a much smaller closet.

There are a couple of other games in town, at a community center in a different suburb (both synagogues are in the 'burbs, too - there are no games in downtown Rochester).

I'm told that the Friday night game, now defunct, was once the biggest in town. It closed down because it dwindled to about 4 tables - some of its regulars just quit driving at night. That game was in a church, the rent was about $50 a session, and at 4 tables it was barely breaking even. Most of our games these days are in the daytime.

I sympathize with your club director, Barry. Hauling supplies around is a pain.

[Frager]

Dealing Machines v Manually Dealt Hands.

My Bridge club has a dealing machine on trial and it has led to a lot of discussion both for and against.

1. Some people find the hands interesting and challenging. There are very few dull flat hands. There are lots of five and six card suits, singletons and voids.
2. Others find these types of hands very difficult. They prefer the more “normal” hands that were generated by manually dealt hands.
3. Beginners find machine dealt hands difficult to bid. They don’t seem to fit into any of the categories of hands they were taught in their lessons. This has made things very difficult for their teachers.
4. The fear is that the continued use of machine dealt hands will cause some people to give up bridge altogether. No one wants that.
5. Hand records are not an issue.

I see the last post on this topic was in July 2012.

If more people have bought dealing machines since then I would like to hear of their experiences.

[FrancesHinden]

I seriously can't remember the last time I played at a club which didn't use a dealing machine. Even small clubs have bought them (or shared the purchase).
Your points 2 and 3 indicate two possibilities:
- either people are shuffling extremely badly if they really think there is such a difference between machine and hand dealt, or
- the perception that the hands are completely different is incorrect

I've seen (in the past, not recently) a lot of the second - people believe that computer-dealt hands are really freaky and remember the distributional hands but forget the boring 1NT-3NT deals.

[Trinidad]

I can hardly believe that in the 21st century hand records are not an issue.

Hand records have many advantages:

• Players can look over the hands at the end of the evening or when they are home. They can email their partners with questions if they want to.
  
• A major consequence of 1): Players do not need to discuss the hands at the table, because they can discuss them later. There is less of a reason to ask your partner why he played the ♣J and didn't find the obvious heart return. This means that the atmosphere at the table is often much more friendly in events where there are hand records. And when an unpleasant discussion flares up, one can almost always extinguish it by saying: "Let's look at it later.". In practice, "later" means that everybody involved can llok at things more objectively, the hormone levels are lower and any dispute can easily be resolved in a friendly way.
  
• A consequence of 2): Since postmortems are not needed, the play is going much faster. Time and energy can be devoted to a difficult bridge hand or talking about the grandchildren. It does not go into having conflicts with partner.
  
• Players can actually learn from their mistakes: They see the hand record and the results that other pairs obtained on the hand and they can ask themselves, at a convenient time with a cup of tea, what others must have done better than what they did. Without hand records this is practically impossible. You need t be a high level player to remember the hands you played and then there is probably not so much that you can learn from the rest of the field.
  
• In many cases, it is much easier for a TD to rule if he has a record of the hand. He will just write down the auction and sit in front of his monitor to check what happened, rather than having to write down who bid what with what hand.

To be honest, I haven't played without hand records for the past 10 years. Before that, I played pairs with hand records and teams without. I really missed the hand records in those team games.

But in the unlikely event that hand records are really not an issue then there is no reason to invest in a duplication machine. Having hand records is the primary reason to have one.

Rik

[Cthulhu D]

Not having hand records is dumb. Like, that is the biggest single amenity. I wouldn't play at a club that didn't have hand records.

[Frager]

Are copies of the hand records printed for everyone?

[1eyedjack]

I am curious to get a feel for the actual cost. So far I gather from the OP that they are about equal, and that the OP has funds for one but not the other.

At one site that I googled the dealing machines cost from 298 euros to 3450 euros + VAT in each case.

http://www.jannerste...df/DUPPRICE.pdf

At another site wireless scoring was priced up by annual subscription, at GBP£35 to £120 per year

http://www.bridgeweb...d=display_page4

Comparing costs on a like for like basis is not trivial. But these do not look remotely similar to me.

[gordontd]

 1eyedjack, on 2014-August-31, 14:29, said:

I am curious to get a feel for the actual cost. So far I gather from the OP that they are about equal, and that the OP has funds for one but not the other.

At one site that I googled the dealing machines cost from 298 euros to 3450 euros + VAT in each case.

http://www.jannerste...df/DUPPRICE.pdf

At another site wireless scoring was priced up by annual subscription, at GBP£35 to £120 per year

http://www.bridgeweb...d=display_page4

Comparing costs on a like for like basis is not trivial. But these do not look remotely similar to me.

Bridgewebs is a website service, not wireless scoring.

[gordontd]

 Frager, on 2014-August-31, 14:10, said:

Are copies of the hand records printed for everyone?

They are everywhere I've been (unless they run out).

[Frager]

Does anyone know of any club that has reverted from machine dealt hands to manually dealt hands?

[mycroft]

Quoting from memory (from blakjak :-):

"There are three kinds of hands played at matchpoints.

• weird distributions, crazy splits, et al, machine-dealt: 'those [deleted] computer hands again.'
  
• weird distributions, crazy splits, set al, hand-dealt: 'boy, the hands are really wild tonight, aren't they?'
  
• flattish hands, nice breaks, doesn't matter who dealt: 'well, that was a fun game. We on for next week?'

and yes, the third option is more prevalent with hand-dealt boards (although provided players shuffle their cards before putting them away the last time, surprisingly little more prevalent), due to insufficient shuffling by a majority of the players who still want to hand-deal.

Anecdata: AFAICan remember, all my 13-card trump fits have been hand dealt.

[Vampyr]

 gordontd, on 2014-August-31, 15:15, said:

They are everywhere I've been (unless they run out).

Unless you have multiple sections, there is not a lot of point in buying a dealing machine if you are not going to have hand records available.

[Siegmund]

Quote

Comparing costs on a like for like basis is not trivial. But these do not look remotely similar to me.

Not exactly the same, but in the same ballpark: in round figures, $4000 for a dealing machine, and $150 each for one to two dozen scoring machines (you need one on every table, in addition to the base station.)

Most small clubs in my area are on a close to break-even basis: that would represent a few years worth of saving up and fundraising, unless a generous member came forward with a big contribution to help make it happen right away. (That's the only reason the club I play at has them.)

Quote

Does anyone know of any club that has reverted from machine dealt hands to manually dealt hands

No, but the Swiss Teams at our annual tournament will be reverting. In addition to the great time commitment to make so many boards with one dealing machine, and the usual resistance to new change, we had many complaints about overhearing results from adjacent tables when an interesting board was in play.

[Trinidad]

 Frager, on 2014-September-01, 16:26, said:

Does anyone know of any club that has reverted from machine dealt hands to manually dealt hands?

I actually do. A little over ten years ago S:t Erik, the largest bridge club in Sweden (and probably the largest face to face bridge club in the world), stopped using machine dealt hands for their team games. (They kept using them for the pairs games.)

There were two reasons:
- results could be overheard from other matches that were playing the same boards.
- the cross-IMP scores seemed to lead to tensions within teams.

The decision to stop with machine dealt hands for teams was pretty controversial at the time. I do not know whether they use machine dealt hands for their team games today, but I can't find hand records for their team games on their website (and they do have them for their pairs games).

Rik