[jmc]

If I have two 15 table sections but only 24 Bridgemate IIs, can I use pick up slips for the tables I don't have Bridgemates? What would be the best way to run the game? I briefly looked at the Bridgemate user manual but didn't find this situation covered.

[gordontd]

Just use all the Bridgemates you have and enter the rest by hand. I've done this before, but maybe your scoring program makes this difficult.

Alternatively, at the end of play renumber six of the Bridgemates and enter scores using them.

[jeffford76]

Not sure where the OP is from. I can confirm what Gordon says works in ACBLScore, having run some games that way myself. You don't have to do anything special about the "missing" machines.

[mycroft]

Yes - if you use pickup slips. Doing it by traveller would be - difficult at best.

all the "load from bridgemate" does (again, this is ACBLscore specific, but I'm sure it's equivalent) is to load in what's on that system. It doesn't wipe out everything else.

Having said that, there will be all kinds of warnings about "these 5 tables don't exist! what am I going to do!"...yeah, I know, that's the way it works. There will also be all kinds of warnings about "there's no score entered for board XXX" when you exit every round you're doing pickups for...that's okay too.

An alternative, of course, is to run section A via bridgemate and B via pickups. If you're going to be typing in 6/15 (BTW, if it's ACBLscore, if at all possible, put the pickups tables at 1-up, not at 10-up. You'll thank me later.) tables every round, it's really not much more time to do all 15.

[RMB1]

mycroft, on 2014-April-03, 11:35, said:

An alternative, of course, is to run section A via bridgemate and B via pickups. If you're going to be typing in 6/15 (BTW, if it's ACBLscore, if at all possible, put the pickups tables at 1-up, not at 10-up. You'll thank me later.) tables every round, it's really not much more time to do all 15.

If you play a whole section without bridgemates you could even use travellers - then the players in both sections can slow the event down by looking at scores from other tables.

[lamford]

jmc, on 2014-April-02, 23:11, said:

What would be the best way to run the game?

To buy some more.

[McBruce]

Two keys to running a large game with not quite enough BridgeMates, or other scoring units:

1. Learn how to enter contracts/declarer/results into the BridgeMate software (not difficult once you get the hang of it). Be sure you know how to enter passouts, doubles, redoubles, and artificial scores. You should be familiar with this from previous games when there are scoring errors, but there are still people out there who only make the score change in the scoring program and don't change the scoring unit data. This leads to fun when the web results say 4♥ + 1, 620 and 12 players phone to ask why.

2. Unless you are training for a long-distance run, make sure the tables using pickups are the ones closest to the scoring table.