Those who played in 2007 Australian Swiss Pairs will have encountered electronic scoring. It sparked considerable interest among those who played, and the possibility of Tamar acquiring such a system has been raised in various quarters. We intend to trial such a system early in 2008 (not the same product as used at the ASP).
In this thread you can comment on the general principle of electronic scoring, and the comparative merits of those systems you have encountered.
On thursday 03 jan 08 we trialled Bridgemate scorers for the first time. I hope that some of you who played will post your comments here, but I have some impressions of my own which I can share.
Firstly, the big load on the director/scorer is moved from the end of the evening to the start of the evening. The movement has to be entered and loaded into the table units before any scores can be entered. Scoring up at the end is comparatively easy.
Secondly, I found the display on the table units a bit hard to read. (I never was a fan of green on black, or black on green displays - give me good old black on white!).
Thirdly, I found the keys a little "sloppy". Sometimes I found I hadn't actually entered what I thought I had entered, apparently because I didn't press the key straight in the middle.
I thought the user interface was OK otherwise. It isn't too hard to work out what you need to do by gut feel.
There was a query about the meaning of the %s displayed. Sometimes they seemed to be NS %s, and sometimes EW. I don't know what is what here, but will try to find out.
The Bridgemate system has an absolutely terrible design flaw. The socket for the power supply on the server is exactly the same as the socket for the "Tournament Director's Key" on the table units; so it is possible to plug the derver power supply into the TD key socket on the table unit. The manual warns that this will damage the unit. No bull? This is a totally inadequate way of preventing such a mistake. The only sane way to do it is to use a different plug/socket combo - one designed for data, not for power!
It wasn't until I tried to set up an event in Scorebridge using the Bridgemates that I realised our version ("edition") of Scorebridge doesn't support Bridgemates. It turns out to be an extra cost option. ASE8 supports Bridgemates out of the box. This was disappointing, as Scorebridge is generally much better suited to our usage. Mixing scoring programs creates other problems, such as incomplete Masterpoint files.
It isn't clear yet how we could handle the situation where we have more tables than Bridgemates.
On this occasion we took the "belt & braces" approach of keeping traveling score sheets as well as the electronic scores. That was probably overkill, and in future I expect we can dispense with the travelers.
Is it all worthwhile? I'm not prepared to commit myself yet. But it will come one day, probably soon.
It is a little disappointing to see nobody else has posted any comments here to date. Does this mean that you are all Ho-Hum about the whole subject now, or that you haven't got to grips with the new web site yet?
As thos who have played Tuesday and Thursday evenings recently will be aware, we have had a couple of near disasters using the Bridgemates. These have all been of my making, and I am pretty confident that I have learned from my mistakes, and can handle the straight forward cases from now on. Never the less, there will be problems at some stage, which are not straight forward. I reckon I still have the capability of making a complete botch of the situation when that happens. The Australian Bridgemate support people are very responsive, and are apparently available by phone until midnight every night. So help is available if required.
How will other directors get on? Obviously, anyone in charge of a Bridgemted session needs some prior training and experience. I think they should also have an experienced Bridgemater on hand for reference for their first few events. Will that be enough? It should be, for the normal case. The abnormal case is likely to provoke a heart attack.
Oh well! I would still like some feedback here. What do you think?
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