[gordontd]

 barmar, on 2012-May-17, 20:13, said:

Vampyr, are you not a native English speaker?

She's an American speaker, but speaks pretty good British English, albeit with an accent.

I think the post in question was just stream-of-consciousness irritation.

[PeterAlan]

 Vampyr, on 2012-May-15, 19:27, said:

I find that when all men and many women are doing the scoring, it doesn't matter whether they usually show it to East or West, when it is a mixed pair they'll give it to the man. Pisses me off.

Barmar, Vampyr was just posting a terse reply that she thought she could abbreviate without misunderstanding. Missing words as italics above, I believe. I could have added "whether he's sitting East or West" if you really want it spelled out.

[PeterAlan]

 Vampyr, on 2012-May-17, 19:31, said:

Yes, I usually do that too; I put it in front of me facing opposite.

When I'm a scoring N, I try to do this unless I've already had a remark from E/W about who will verify. However, I don't always manage this, and when I'm just automatically going through the motions without thinking about it (which is all too easy to do) I'll occasionally not comply with such a request the next time (embarrassing when a female W is the designated verifier for all the reasons above).

I suspect that there may be another factor at play - I'm right-handed, keep and key the Bridgemate on my right, and put it on the table with my right hand. Doing that, when extending my right arm to put the Bridgemate on the table it's physically easier / more natural to move it across my body and leave it slightly in front of E than it is to place it in front of W. I think if I were a scoring S I'd have a slight bias to inviting W to verify both for that reason and because as N I'm familiar with the player on my left being the commoner choice of verifier.

[Vampyr]

Many comments in this thread have indicated that the verifying pair (normally E/W) often have a preference as to who checks the Bridgemate and that those who score will tend, for various reasons, to usually hand it one way or the other.

The issue in the OP, however, was about E/W apparently having a preference as to whether North or South was doing the scoring. I can't see why this would matter to the opposition; can anyone?

[Vampyr]

 gordontd, on 2012-May-18, 02:19, said:

She's an American speaker, but speaks pretty good British English, albeit with an accent.

No, it's you lot that have an accent.

[PeterAlan]

 Vampyr, on 2012-May-18, 08:57, said:

The issue in the OP, however, was about E/W apparently having a preference as to whether North or South was doing the scoring. I can't see why this would matter to the opposition; can anyone?

The issue in the OP was about whether it was OK for S to do the scoring - I don't see anything that says that it was an E/W that raised the question - but, in the absence of any Law or regulation that specifies who should be doing it, like you I can't see any reason for it to be any business of E/W which way round it is. The personalities of the particular Norths and Souths, their tendencies to hog Bridgemates (or not), etc would be more significant table-by-table factors I would have thought.

Occasionally, both travellers and Bridgemates are in use (for example, if the Bridgemate wireless connection is iffy, or if there's a requirement to fill out travellers for a sim pairs), and it can sometimes save a bit of time (though is marginally more likely to incur errors) if one of N/S does the traveller and the other the Bridgemate.

[aguahombre]

 Vampyr, on 2012-May-18, 08:57, said:

No, it's you lot that have an accent.

Yes, and our writing and reading comprehension is often affected by our accent. We are the ones who took English and turned it into a different language (we and the Aussies). We should be the ones who endeavor to understand real English, not the English.

[barmar]

 PeterAlan, on 2012-May-18, 03:32, said:

Barmar, Vampyr was just posting a terse reply that she thought she could abbreviate without misunderstanding. Missing words as italics above, I believe. I could have added "whether he's sitting East or West" if you really want it spelled out.

You have to admit, those italicizes words are kind of important -- they're the whole point of her complaint!

[barmar]

 PeterAlan, on 2012-May-18, 03:49, said:

suspect that there may be another factor at play - I'm right-handed, keep and key the Bridgemate on my right, and put it on the table with my right hand. Doing that, when extending my right arm to put the Bridgemate on the table it's physically easier / more natural to move it across my body and leave it slightly in front of E than it is to place it in front of W. I think if I were a scoring S I'd have a slight bias to inviting W to verify both for that reason and because as N I'm familiar with the player on my left being the commoner choice of verifier.

I'm also right-handed, and keep it on my right. But when I finish scoring, all I usually do is rotate the device in place, and maybe slide it towards the closest opponent, which is West.

[daveharty]

 aguahombre, on 2012-May-17, 08:38, said:

Good grief. If to whom I hand the BridgeMate might be a violation of 74A2, we have gone too far with "political correctness"

This was your first clue?

[Vampyr]

This evening. I was playing North/South, so the opponents only used the Bridgemate during the arrow-switch. On the first board of the arrow-switch, the opponent entered the score and pushed the Bridgemate towards my (male) partner. I reached over and took it, and placed it facing away from me and verified the score.

On the second board, the opponent turned the Bridgemate towards my partner, but kept in the corner, where I could not easily reach it.

By the way, I was East, and if I am not mistaken the Bridgemate I's at this club still say "verified by East".

[CamHenry]

 Vampyr, on 2012-May-30, 19:24, said:

This evening. I was playing North/South, so the opponents only used the Bridgemate during the arrow-switch. On the first board of the arrow-switch, the opponent entered the score and pushed the Bridgemate towards my (male) partner. I reached over and took it, and placed it facing away from me and verified the score.

On the second board, the opponent turned the Bridgemate towards my partner, but kept in the corner, where I could not easily reach it.

By the way, I was East, and if I am not mistaken the Bridgemate I's at this club still say "verified by East".

That's a bit* out of order. My habit is to wave the Bridgemate around looking as vague as I can, until (a) the oppo underestimate me and throw tricks at me on the next board and (b) someone says "oh, I'll do it". With the more vague oppo, I say "Will you verify this for me please?"

* - well, more than.

[gnasher]

Last night I made a point of handing the BridgeMate to the female half of each mixed pair. One of the men reached across the table and grabbed the BridgeMate from in front of his partner. He did that again on the second board. On the other rounds, one or two of the women seemed sllightly surprised, but everyone else took it in their stride.

[barmar]

Last night I generally handed them to the West players (see my earlier post about handing it to the player close to where I keep the BridgeMate). Coincidentally, in all the male-female pairs, the women were all sitting West.

The only time East ever did the checking was in a pair consisting of a two male national champions -- the West player handed it to his partner to check.

[mgoetze]

This thread is really weird to me. In Germany, it is absolutely the default that North enters scores into the BridgeMate and East verifies them. It would never occur to me to hand the BridgeMate to the younger, older, more male or more female member of the opposing pair - I would always hand it to East.

[Zelandakh]

 mgoetze, on 2012-June-03, 08:31, said:

This thread is really weird to me. In Germany, it is absolutely the default that North enters scores into the BridgeMate and East verifies them. It would never occur to me to hand the BridgeMate to the younger, older, more male or more female member of the opposing pair - I would always hand it to East.

Playing in Germany, I (male, always sitting West) got the BridgeMate Saturday for one hand (out of 22) for the first time in months. My (female) partner always does the verification because the North's automatically hand her the console.

[FrancesHinden]

I'd never thought about this until reading this thread, so at the weekend we decided to pay attention. Unfortunately we were N/S throughout for all 3 days, so I couldn't experiment that much.
However, Jallerton was playing with a female partner and when they were sitting EW, he sat West, and he said that

- for the first 5 pr 6 rounds the BM was always given to him
- they then played a pair who knew his partner but not him, and it was given to her to check
- then they played a pair where the female North put it in front of the female East to check, only (immediately) to have the male South move it to ask the male west to check. This is quite funny.

Sitting North, when our side declared, I gave it to the nearest player to the BM to check i.e. initially East, as it tended to start sitting on my left. When they declared I gave it to declarer to check, which means that it sometimes changed to being on my right side. In the majority of cases the person I gave it to checked it, but maybe 20% of the time it was a mixed partnership the man insisted on checking. The man never gave it to the woman to check except for when we played Bluejak, who has also been reading this thread, and insisted his female partner should do it.

[Jeremy69A]

Extraordinary. Nearly 3 pages of obsessing about who gets to score/check and who might be offended if they don't get shown the BM and whether this constitutes an offence under some discrimination act. Perhaps we can add this to the prescribed table of penalties. 1vp(or 13.7% of a top) for showing the BM to a male, unasked, in a mixed partnership.
I nearly always score if I am North or South and usually ask who would like to check. I occasionally make an assumption if one member of the partnership is over 90(ageist,I know).

When Bridge Mates first started to be used there was a discussion about whether there should be something in English Bridge on how they worked and what the etiquette might be. There was also some discussion about putting in a photo and labelling the key parts. The person taking the minutes at this meeting was not a bridge player and gave all members of the committee strange looks. It became clear that there was a fundamental misunderstanding about what a bridge mate actually was and an erroneous conclusion had been reached by the minute taker!

[gnasher]

 Jeremy69A, on 2012-June-05, 08:41, said:

Extraordinary. Nearly 3 pages of obsessing about who gets to score/check

That's not true: we were obsessing about how other people obsess about this. None of us actually care (though I suspect that there are a number of TDs who would prefer me to stay away from the Bridgemate).

[aguahombre]

 gnasher, on 2012-June-05, 09:49, said:

That's not true: we were obsessing about how other people obsess about this. None of us actually care (though I suspect that there are a number of TDs who would prefer me to stay away from the Bridgemate).

Is that discrimination against the handicapped?