[hrothgar]

I just sat in on the Online TD training session conducted on BBO.

I'd like to start by thanks BBO (or the WBF) or whoever it was that arranged this sessions and provided such a knowledgebale director. LusoBrasil was (obviously) highly qualified to lead this discussion. He definitely knew the subject and was able to provide good cogent explanations of the material.

With this said and done, its unclear to me whether a lecture format is the best way to be presenting the material. We had a very large audience with diverse interests and questions. The sheer volume of questions made life a bit chaotic. Equally significant, while Rui was able to provide a lot of valuable information, there really isn't any permanent record available that TDS can consult.

From my perspective, it would be extremely useful if the WBF would encourage some of its TDs to participate on the BBO web forums. I think that their input would be extremely valuable for the "local" TDs. Equally significant, I think that the WBF desperately needs more practical experience with the online environment.

Thanks again

[Gerardo: Edited thread title to unambiguous date format, and to fix date]

[fred]

Rui (very kindly) took the initiative in this case.

The WBF had nothing to do with it.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[jillybean]

Great session thanks very much, I hope more will follow.

This is another good forum for TD's:

http://forums.bridgetalk.com

[Echognome]

What I thought was especially nice was Luso's knowledge of online play and the online environment. His explanations on how to interpret the laws within the context of online play was fantastic. I, for one, learned a lot from it.

I agree with Richard that the format could have been slightly improved. I personally think it would have been better if one or more of the yellows that were there could have filtered the questions rather than just booting people for speaking out of turn. I had someone telling me "I want to ask a question, but I'm afraid of being booted." But, I also understand the role they were there to keep some order, so I don't begrudge them. In the future, it would be nice for lectures if there were some way to handle questions. Perhaps this can be handled with software? We could maybe have moderators (they needn't necessarily be yellows) who could handle questions and coordinate with the lecturer.

As per what we learned, it lead to a couple of software issues. The first being the ability to assign a procedural penalty and also a split score. Until we have this, we will not be able to make the contest as fair as it can be. The second thing that was interesting to me was what to do with unfinished boards. In f2f bridge, once a board is started, the TD must let the pair finish. So I can understand the viewpoint that the TD should not let avg-/avg-. Perhaps the solution to this is to shorten the round clocks and then as tables are delayed they can get warnings and then procedural penalties as mentioned above for continual slow play. This will also be fairer for those that want to take their avg- rather than the poor result they are about to get. If the TD is desparate to get the next round going and a table is just way to slow, that TD can always assign a result to complete the round. I'm not sure how practical my suggestion is as it will require an active TD and certainly cannot be done with a playing TD. But, it would be nice to have clocked rounds where everyone doesn't move on until the TD can sort out all of the tables.