[gordontd]

McBruce, on 2014-September-19, 03:57, said:

Are you counting the time it takes to remove 32 decks of cards from the boards? With old-style metal boards I am lucky if I can average 20-25 minutes per set of 36 in a tournament week.

Yes, I'm including taking the old cards out the boards and putting them in the machine, which I do find I can just about do while the previous board is being dealt. I asked Gill Pain who deals most of the EBU's boards and she said the best she can do is about 360 boards an hour, with a well laid out workspace and serviced machine, but more usually does about 240 an hour because of loading files, printing hand records and marking sets for identification.

[Vampyr]

McBruce, on 2014-September-19, 03:57, said:

Are you counting the time it takes to remove 32 decks of cards from the boards? With old-style metal boards I am lucky if I can average 20-25 minutes per set of 36 in a tournament week.

Not having boards that open makes a big difference.

Quote

--cards fade and become unreadable and need to be replaced more often.
--directors end up duplicating the boards and have to arrive much earlier to do so, something which many will not happily do for free

If I am not mistaken, cards used in a dealing machine last longer; it is shuffling that wears out the cards.

The director or another volunteer could prepare the boards at home. Most clubs without their own premises do this.

Quote

people look at the four or five hands they are interested in and ignore the rest, making this basically a colossal waste of toner and paper.

If the club has a bar or people go to a pub afterwards, these people will look at almost all the hands (on hand records). But as with anything else, it depends on whether the club can afford the expense, which I think is much less than, say, a paid director.

[jeffford76]

McBruce, on 2014-September-19, 03:57, said:

I don't know how much memory the scoring units have inside them, but one excellent feature would be the ability to send each scoring machine the game results when a game ends, and have a set up so that a player could use any idle scoring machine to check results and see hand records for the boards he is interested in at any time. These days memory is cheap and the machines should be able to save and display game information for at least, say, ten days. This would cut down HUGELY on the amount of paper and toner clubs go through. In addition to hand records, many ACBL players (even those who can access the results online and see what happened at EVERY table) still demand "summary" sheets with their matchpoints and results only, sometimes two copies so both partners can have one. Most people look at the four or five hands they are interested in and ignore the rest, making this basically a colossal waste of toner and paper. Of the 8-20 pages I print each game, there are usually 4-6 of them that don't make it out the door. Imagine being able to go to any idle scoring device and access results from the game just finished, or two days ago, or even last week. What would it take, maybe 1MB of cheap memory in each $120 unit to save a forest? Make it happen, BridgeMate!

I am fairly confident that the people who want paper summaries instead of checking web results will also want paper summaries instead of looking things up on Bridgemates. One of the clubs I work at just refuses to print summaries - I think this is the only way to get rid of them.

[Siegmund]

Quote

I don't know how much memory the scoring units have inside them, but one excellent feature would be the ability to send each scoring machine the game results when a game ends,

They do that. You can get your matchpoint result on all 26 boards, from any idle bridgemate in the room, along with your rank. It doesn't display the hand records -- the screen is too small for that right now, and we dont really want people to stay in the playing area all night to do that. (It doesn't send everyone's results to every bridgemate: you type in your pair number, the client sends a request, and the server responds with that pairs results)

But the "in" thing now is to use the Fast Results service, and get a text with a link to a webpage with everyone's scores, hand records, and double-dummy analysis sent to you. Of course this does exacerbate the tendency for people to eat dinner with their noses buried in their smartphones.

[Vampyr]

Siegmund, on 2014-September-21, 08:20, said:

They do that. You can get your matchpoint result on all 26 boards, from any idle bridgemate in the room, along with your rank. It doesn't display the hand records -- the screen is too small for that right now, and we dont really want people to stay in the playing area all night to do that. (It doesn't send everyone's results to every bridgemate: you type in your pair number, the client sends a request, and the server responds with that pairs results)

But the "in" thing now is to use the Fast Results service, and get a text with a link to a webpage with everyone's scores, hand records, and double-dummy analysis sent to you. Of course this does exacerbate the tendency for people to eat dinner with their noses buried in their smartphones.

Dinner after a bridge session? Seems a little late to be eating.

[gordontd]

Vampyr, on 2014-September-21, 13:34, said:

Dinner after a bridge session? Seems a little late to be eating.

You don't play bridge in the afternoon?

[Vampyr]

gordontd, on 2014-September-22, 02:20, said:

You don't play bridge in the afternoon?

Not often. After all, evening games (and partners for them) are much more widely available. Though I confess I played yesterday afternoon.

[gordontd]

Vampyr, on 2014-September-22, 06:55, said:

Not often. After all, evening games (and partners for them) are much more widely available. Though I confess I played yesterday afternoon.

You used to be a mainstay of the YC Tue/Thu afternoon games, to say nothing of afternoon sessions at congresses!

[Siegmund]

My area has been stricken by a disease of 10AM-and-3PM start times, with long alcohol-fueled discussions over a late dinner afterward. On the traditional 1-and-7 schedule, the afternoon hands got discussed at dinner still though.

[Vampyr]

gordontd, on 2014-September-22, 07:32, said:

You used to be a mainstay of the YC Tue/Thu afternoon games, to say nothing of afternoon sessions at congresses!

Yes, Thursdays for sure, but of course the YC is now lodging at the Wood, and you can't get there from here.