[mrdct]

The Victor Champion Cup, one of Australia's premier teams events that earns playoff qualifying points towards national selection, is being played in a couple of weeks time in Melbourne. It is a 10-round swiss teams event and when the music stops the winner is declared. As is the practice with all events in Australia, pre-duplicated boards are used with the same hands being played across the field which has several advantages such as everyone gets the same volatility in the boards each round, people can discuss the hands with each other over dinner and datum results are produced so individual pairs can get some assessment of their performance without the millstone of teammates dragging them down.

For several years there has been BBO coverage of the leading table for the last six rounds which has proven quite popular and I'd like to think has had a part in the fairly significant growth in attendance over recent years. Last year there was a complaint from a fairly high-profile bridge columnist that with the proliferation of iPhones the related security risks interfere with the integrity of the event. Like most jurisdictions, Australian tournament regulations require electronic devices to be switched-off in the playing area but it's hard to police the guy who might slip off to the toilet half-way through the match, look at a few boards and come back to the table and get everything right.

What the ABF has decided to do is the match being played on BBO is going to use a different set of boards and in the final two-rounds the different set will be used by the top-four matches and the players in those matches will have a further restriction that they have to lodge their electronic devices with the convenor; I guess using a simlar process to what occurs at NABCs. It seems like a fairly sensible approach to the problem, but I'm interested in what other people might think.

[Mbodell]

It seems ok to me. I think the fairness of the event and the players wishes trump spectators and datum.

Another alternative would be to delay the Vugraph of the matches either by delaying the software broadcast or by intentionally starting the top matches late. Do the other tables play the boards in order or in a semi-random order within the set? If they play them in order then starting the top matches 15 minutes late might be sufficient.

[mrdct]

Mbodell, on 2011-May-31, 00:00, said:

It seems ok to me. I think the fairness of the event and the players wishes trump spectators and datum.

Another alternative would be to delay the Vugraph of the matches either by delaying the software broadcast or by intentionally starting the top matches late. Do the other tables play the boards in order or in a semi-random order within the set? If they play them in order then starting the top matches 15 minutes late might be sufficient.

Delays wouldn't work as the event runs on a very tight schedule with the swiss draw being completed just a few minutes after the last bridgemate results are in. The matches are 14-boards with each set of 14-boards shared between 6 tables so each table starts with a different board.

[ArtK78]

It should be a simple matter to have the BBO Vugraph on a 30 minute delay. That should solve the security problem while not impacting adversely on the tournament schedule.

[mrdct]

There are a few problems with that:

1. The BBO software doesn't have the capability to broadcast on delay so the only way of doing this would be to manually record the play and then do a virtual broadcast after the stipulated time delay. This would basically double the labour cost for the operators which I don't think would fly with the convenors.

2. With boards shared around 6 tables, there will be on table that won't play boards 1 and 2 until the very end of the session, so if the delay is to be completely effective it will need to be a 2 hour delay which just won't work.

3. Like any sport, vugraph is best watched live to get everything in tempo and not be tempted to jump online to see the live score. It's largely for that reason that I never watch Friday night football (which is on delay in Australia) as I just can't stop myself from checking the live score.