[mrdct]

As some would be aware, in their wisdom the Cavendish organisers decided that rather than use Roland's commentary panel, they would try to hand-pick the commentators that they want for the Cavendish. Not surprisingly there seems to be a ground-swell of loyalty to Roland with many of Roland's regular commentators declining the opportunity to commentate on the Cavendish which I think is commendable.

Whilst we wont always agree with the commentators on Roland's panel or indeed like the style of some of Roland's commentators, I think we can all agree that Roland does a monumental amount of work in coordinating the commentators for BBO vugraph which generally results in a favourable viewer experience.

The Cavendish organisers evidently think they can do a better job, but it's looking like they will wind up having to resort to non-union labour with a commensurate reduction in quality.

[fred]

I think you (and whatever regular commentaors are refusing to be involved in this year's Cavendish broadcast) are making a big deal out of nothing.

When a tournament organizer expresses interest in broadcasting vugraph on BBO, we give them the choice between finding their own commentators and having Roland take care of it. Almost all tournaments select the Roland option. For some reason (which none of us know) the Cavendish decided they wanted to handle things themselves this year.

To his credit, Roland handled this well and as far as I can tell he (correctly) did not see this as a reflection on either himself or on his regular commentators as a group. Maybe he even appreciates the (short) break he is getting and is looking forward to watching a great tournament without having to worry about the details.

Your conclusion that "the Cavendish organizers evidently thought they could do a better job" is unfounded. Perhaps there is one regular BBO commentator who has managed to offend one of the tournament organizers or one of big sponsors who regularly plays in (and helps to finance) the Cavendish. Perhaps they just decided that they want to be in control of how their tournament is presented to the world. That is their right since it is *their* tournament - that is why we give them the choice.

And your prediction of the likely reduction is quality is unfair. Give these people a chance - maybe you will be pleasantly surprised. There are certainly many capable people out there who are not among Roland's regulars. Maybe some of these people will show up.

I will be the first to agree with you that Roland does an outstanding job and I probably know better than anyone just how difficult this is (because I once did this job myself and because I also see all the things Roland does behind the scenes that the general public is not aware of).

I also agree that it is nice to see some of the regular commentators showing Roland the loyalty and support that he clearly deserves, but I think that those who are refusing to be involved in the Cavendish production are overreacting.

I do not think that anyone should take the Cavendish's decision personally. We don't know why they made this decision and we don't know how it will turn out. If it is a disaster then hopefully the organizers will learn from their mistakes and choose to work with Roland next year.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Walddk]

I am not going to get into a long debate about this issue, but I think it is appropriate to tell that for the first time during my 3½ years in charge of coordinating our vugraph presentations, an event organizer has been reluctant to trust my judgement.

As Fred points out, we don't know why, and I completely agree that any organizer has the right to find their own commentators. It's even stated in our vugraph guidelines which Fred and I wrote a couple of years ago.

I am obviously aware of the fact that certain regular commentators have pulled out or declined the invitation they got. Loyalty to me and the work I do on a daily basis are the reasons. I don't think anyone can blame me for being happy about the support they are showing me.

By all means, let others get the chance, if the organizers think they can do a better job. I can't see why they shouldn't be able to perform well, but allow me to say that they may find what a tricky task it is to commentate bridge “in writing”. This will perhaps be a somewhat sobering experience for the organizers.

I have some experience regarding this aspect of vugraph broadcasts.

Roland

[glen]

Roland deserves every possible break he can get- it would be great if more tourneys took the burden off him. We should support tournaments that "handle it all", not work against them.

Personally it seems Roland is able to work 200 hours a week, operate 8 accounts at one time, and get by with 2 hours of sleep. We can't keep him working for the bridge community at this rate. The Cavendish direction is a good move, not a bad one.

[Walddk]

Although I agree that I deserve the occasional break, I believe it's rather naive to think that this is the reason for the organizers' decision. I honestly don't think this is a big concern of theirs, but I would welcome if I must stand corrected.

Roland

[glen]

Yes, their motives are suspect but their intentions may help

[hrothgar]

One quick comment:

As I noted in the past, a better chat system is probably at the top of my wish-list for BBO. (The only feature that really comes close would be modifying the system for creating team games)

Ideally, I'd love to see functionality similar to that used in Massively Multi-Player Online Games like "World of Warcraft" (WoW). Here is a quick summary regarding how WoW works its chat system.

WoW breaks chat into three different categories:

1. Person to Person chat. The feature is allows one individual to send a message to another selected individual. This is identical to functionality currently provided in BBO.

2. Location specific chat. WoW divides the world into separate geographical locations (The Undercity, Thunder Bluff, or the Eastern Plaguelands) Players have the option to to send messages to everyone located in this region. Conceptually, this is identical to functionality currently supported in WoW, with a table/chat room/lobby substituting for a geographical region.

3. "Affiliation groups". WoW permits anyone to create their own chat channel channel. These channels are used for anything / everything. I've seen chat channels for "Guilds" (think private bridge clubs), Buy/Selling loot, looking for people to team with, gossip... You name it. There is a channel for it. When a player creates a channel he gives it a name and sets certain ground rules (will the channel be moderated? Do players need permission to join the channel? Is the channel is visible to everyone? Will the channel use profanity filters). Once a channel has been created, players have the option to join it. Alternatively, at any given point in time, players have the option to quit a channel.

How might this type of functionality be used on BBO? Hypothetically, I might decide to create a Channel titled "Tournament Spam". Anyone who wanted to advertise an upcoming tournament could use this channel to advertise to willing participants. Alternatively, to use a more timely example, there would be no reason that the Cavendish organizers couldn't run VuGraph on one channel while a second group of commentators babbled away on a second channel.

(AS I've noted in the past, the "big" fantasy games like WoW have already encountered almost all the same issues that BBO has and the developers have come up with some good solutions. Admitted, they also have a lot more developers, but its the principle that counts)

[mrdct]

fred, on May 9 2006, 08:20 PM, said:

And your prediction of the likely reduction is quality is unfair. Give these people a chance - maybe you will be pleasantly surprised. There are certainly many capable people out there who are not among Roland's regulars. Maybe some of these people will show up.

The quality of the bridge of itself will ensure a good show and, no doubt, there will be sufficient capable commentators floating around to provide some good commentary.

Everyone has different tastes and different expectations of their commentators, but from my own personal perspective the likely absence of several of my favourite commentators will detract somewhat from my viewing experience.

It was not my intent to bag the Cavendish organisers. I just wanted to express my support for Roland and illustrate what can go wrong when people act outside the normal protocol for commentator procurement.

On a related topic, previous Cavendish broadcasts on BBO have sufferred from the following:

1. Players names get overtyped each round which leads to the LIN file at the end not having the correct player names against each board. I'm not sure if a software solution has been developed or if the vugraph operator would be better to close and restart after each round.

2. As with all pairs events, there is no comparitive score. As I've suggested in the past, it would be nice to have either a Deep Finesse Par-Score or an example result generated from having four GIB players play the board out in the background. Are either of these solutions possible?

[Walddk]

I have now seen the list of commentators who have been invited. Curiously, they are all on my contact list, so why the organizers didn't want to use the service I render is somewhat inexplicable.

Maybe Fred will find out over the next few days.

Roland

[FrancesHinden]

It's all about motives, I'd say, and without knowing motives I wouldn't know whether to be pleased or upset in Roland's place.

If it's "we think we can do a better job of organising it ourselves" or "we don't think you can do a good job" then I'd feel insulted.

If it's because they don't trust Roland's judgement I'd feel insulted.

If it's because they'd simply rather feel the whole of the Cavendish was under their own control I'd feel neutral.

If it's because there are particular commentators they want or don't want (for whatever reason), they may feel it's more diplomatic to do their own organisation than to ask BBO to organise commentary but specify who not to invite and I'd feel neutral.

If it's because they only want US commentators (say), or because they thought they had more influence with particular people who aren't on Roland's list, I might feel insulted but I might not, I don't know...

If they thought it would simply make life easier for BBO overall then I'd feel pleased. There are two other events being broadcast over the weekend as well.

So who knows? Maybe I should feel insulted that they didn't ask me. But then I doubt anyone organising the Cavendish knows or cares who I am, so I won't. Perhaps that's why they don't want me commentating: they only want people they know.

[hrothgar]

Walddk, on May 10 2006, 02:13 PM, said:

I have now seen the list of commentators who have been invited. Curiously, they are all on my contact list, so why the organizers didn't want to use the service I render is somewhat inexplicable.

Hi Roland

To be perfectly honest, I dont see anything remotely wrong with the Cavendish organizers coordinating their own VuGraph.

I readily admit, you have volunteered enormous amounts of time and effort on BBO's VuGraphs. These contributions should be (and I believe are) recognized by the BBO community at large. With this said and done, you certainly don't have any entitlement to be involved in the process. Ultimately, whats important is providing quality Vugraph's, not ensuring that Walddk is coordinating the Vugraph. I don't claim that you don't understand this difference. However, the fact that some of the Vugraph commentators are choosing not to work with the Cavendish organizers definitely suggests that the man may be overshadowing the mission.

I've worked in a number of large and successful companies. One of the most important points that I learned is that no one is indispensible. Good systems need to be robust and resilient to failure. They can't have a single point of failure. In turn, this means that you need to give others folks a chance to step up to the plate and get some practical experience.

Somehow I doubt that the Cavendish operators are thinking about things in quite this same way, however, the end result is the same. I think that this development is a very healthy one.

[FrancesHinden]

As a side note, I remember watching some of the Cavendish pairs on BBO last year. Bocchi/Duboin (I think) had a huge screw-up in the auction against Buratti-Lanzarotti. Some of the commentators suggested it was deliberate as Bocchi/Duboin were out of contention and B/L were doing very well. Others immediately stamped on that, but it's just the sort of thing I believe commentators absolutely should not say.

[Walddk]

hrothgar, on May 10 2006, 02:45 PM, said:

Hi Roland

With this said and done, you certainly don't have any entitlement to be involved in the process.  Ultimately, whats important is providing quality Vugraph's, not ensuring that Walddk is coordinating the Vugraph.

Not sure what your point is when I explicitly state that any organizer has every right to find their own commentators. Here is what I sent to all 188 commentators 4 days ago:

Hi all,

You will probably be wondering why you don't get my usual e-mail ahead of this year's edition of the Cavendish in Las Vegas (May 10-14) now that you see it listed on our vugraph schedule web page.

The reason you will not be asked to be a commentator is because the organizers have decided to handle this themselves. Let me add that no BBO rule has been violated. We offer our software for free and we do not interfere if the organizers want to find their own commentators.

I will certainly come back to you in a day or two regarding the Finnish Open Team Championships and the friendly international between Netherlands and England next week.

Regards,

Roland

....

Where exactly is it I'm saying that it's important that Walddk coordinates the vugraph? I let others decide if it's important or not.

[Walddk]

FrancesHinden, on May 10 2006, 02:41 PM, said:

It's all about motives, I'd say, and without knowing motives I wouldn't know whether to be pleased or upset in Roland's place.

As things have developed I am pretty indifferent. No, I don't know their motives (at least not officially), but I have a suspicion. I do not intend to insult the whole nation - I have always been and will always be pro-American - but personally I think this is American elitism at its worst.

I dislike that, yes, and it's far from what I'm used to on this side of the pond. So perhaps I'm pleased and upset at the same time. Lots of vugraph presentations coming up over the next few weeks, and I will be more than happy to take part in all of those.

Roland

[Sigi_BC84]

hrothgar, on May 10 2006, 03:45 AM, said:

Ideally, I'd love to see functionality similar to that used in Massively Multi-Player Online Games like "World of Warcraft" (WoW).  Here is a quick summary regarding how WoW works its chat system.

Yeah, now we've got WoW mentioned on BBF. Thanks for that ;-).

Your suggestions regarding the chat systems are nice, I've had something similar in mind for a long time. Actually what I was thinking of was not WoW (or similar games) but IRC (Internet Relay Chat) which happens to be around for ages (way longer than ICQ or the like) and naturally does handle chat quite well...

IRC, too, has a system based on channels. Every participiant can open as many channels as he/she likes. After opening a channel you are alone in that channel and automatically marked as "channel operator", which means that you can make other people operator, kick them etc. (sort of like after opening a table in the MBC). I'd like to see something like that in BBO. Do not constrain the system in terms of rooms or room names. Keep it flexible and let people open their own channel. The community will very very quickly converge on a few popular channels which will be kept open (e.g. #teams for tourney ads or #bidding for bidding questions etc.).

Furthermore, tables will be their own channel, as will be tourneys, vugraph arenae etc. etc.

Also, the GUI should be revamped. Make the chat line a permanent part of the main window, instead of displaying a detached window on demand! Many people are chatting all the time anyway, and that chat window is constanly hidden or popping up and covering part of the text you want to read, it really has to become part of the main window.

You could have a look at popular IRC clients (for example XChat) and mimic them in terms of chat functionality.

Something like this will make BBO sexier than ever!

Thanks, Richard, for bringing it up, now I've finally gotten around to writing up some of my ideas (I'm aware that I mostly repeated what you wrote, but it just turned out that way, sorry :-).

--Sigi

[Echognome]

Well, although it has been said by some posters previously, I don't think it can hurt to say again how much we appreciate the work you do Roland. I'm happy to see the support you are getting from the commentators as well. I can't say I understand any of the politics involved here, but I hope they are resolved for you.

[fred]

The reason the chat entry is done in its own window (as opposed to be part of the main BBO window):

A lot of people have 800x600 screen resolution so we have to make sure that BBO can be used on such PCs. If you set your BBO window size to the smallest setting (control-W will do this) and go to a table, you will see that all the vertical space on the screen is used and there is no space for a chat entry bar.

If the chat bar was part of the main window then something else would have to go. We could make do things like make cards smaller, fonts smaller, abandon the notion of the vertical dummy, etc... That might leave enough room for a chat entry control that is part of the main window. We had to use judgment in this area and I think we made the right decision (especially when you consider that many bridge players are elderly and have poor eyesite).

A couple of years ago I made some (painful) programming changes that made the entire BBO window resizable. At bigger window sizes there is enough space to include a permanent chat entry area and I did consider doing this, but this proved to be problematic (I won't bore you with the details) due to some early design decisions that were hard to ignore. I am sure I could eventually figure out a good way to do this, but the time is coming for us to stop working on such things. Here is why:

There are some fundamental problems with both the BBO UI and our client/server protocols due to the fact that when BBO was written I did not really think about how everything would work with many 1000s of people online. Uday and I are thinking that the best way to address these problems is to largely start from scratch (as opposed to what we have been doing for years - adding bandaid solutions to problems that I should have addressed in the first place).

We are running out of bandaids so it looks like our next major project will be a general rewrite of the entire BBO client (and much of the server). Hopefully this will result in a much improved user experience.

But we need to get started on this at some point or it will never happen. We could easily spend another year (or 3) tinkering with the existing system and adding minor improvements (such as fixed chat entry area for big window sizes). At some point, however, we are going to have to take the position that "BBO will be OK as it is for the X months that it will take for us to rewrite an improved version".

We are close to being at that point.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[sdoty]

There are a few things I would like to say publicly, as the person responsible for the decision regarding the commentary for the Cavendish.

My decision to make the arrangements personally was not meant as a negative comment on Roland Wald's ability or the overall quality of the broadcasts he organizes. As an occasional operator I have worked alongside Roland several times and respect and appreciate his tireless work.

I want to stress that at no point did the organizers say or insinuate "we would be unhappy with Roland". Responsibility for the decision rests on me personally, no where else.

When a broadcast is scheduled, events are given the option to utilize the service Roland provides but are also free to organize commentary directly. I am not of the opinion that choosing the latter option is inherently a disparagement of the former option, and I regret that it has been seen that way by some.

I made the choice I believed most appropriate for this tournament, and opted to undertake the task as part of the job of organizing the whole broadcast. I worked as the operator for the Cavendish in 2004, and handled all of the on-site arrangements and operation in 2005. I've taken pride in that work and it was my hope to expand and enhance the broadcast this year. Not all of the changes proved possible for this year, but I will be following through with the commentary scheduling I began.

My reasons were not political, nor were they a reflection on Roland, nor was this a question of believing I could step in and do a better job. I did and still do respect the difficulty of the role. Was my choice the traditional one? No. Is the only reason to choose to do something differently a belief that the traditional method is bad? No -- at least not in my mind.

I don't believe that the on-site and on-line elements of a broadcast should necessarily be seperate. I also don't think it's inappropriate for a tournament coordinator to say "okay, we are going to take on the responsibility for inviting commentators as well". I am not offering those as reasons for my decision, but feel they are relevant elements of the position from which I view things.

I truly regret that some people have felt offended by the decision, or believe that it was made in a different spirit than what I have expressed. My reasons were honest (whether or not that is accepted by all), but I apologize to those who have seen this in a different light. It is unfortunate that certain commentators have chosen not to participate, but that is their right and I respect their decision.

Susan

[Sigi_BC84]

fred, on May 10 2006, 04:31 PM, said:

We are running out of bandaids so it looks like our next major project will be a general rewrite of the entire BBO client (and much of the server). Hopefully this will result in a much improved user experience.

I am really glad to hear that, and of course I agree, BBO sorely needs a rewrite instead of patching it over and over again.

I think I have mentioned before that Java would be a great platform, haven't I? :-)

I'm looking forward already to testing the new thing when the first betas are released.

--Sigi

[pclayton]

sdoty, on May 10 2006, 09:26 AM, said:

There are a few things I would like to say publicly, as the person responsible for the decision regarding the commentary for the Cavendish.

My decision to make the arrangements personally was not meant as a negative comment on Roland Wald's ability or the overall quality of the broadcasts he organizes. As an occasional operator I have worked alongside Roland several times and respect and appreciate his tireless work.

I want to stress that at no point did the organizers say or insinuate "we would be unhappy with Roland". Responsibility for the decision rests on me personally, no where else.

When a broadcast is scheduled, events are given the option to utilize the service Roland provides but are also free to organize commentary directly. I am not of the opinion that choosing the latter option is inherently a disparagement of the former option, and I regret that it has been seen that way by some.

I made the choice I believed most appropriate for this tournament, and opted to undertake the task as part of the job of organizing the whole broadcast. I worked as the operator for the Cavendish in 2004, and handled all of the on-site arrangements and operation in 2005. I've taken pride in that work and it was my hope to expand and enhance the broadcast this year. Not all of the changes proved possible for this year, but I will be following through with the commentary scheduling I began.

My reasons were not political, nor were they a reflection on Roland, nor was this a question of believing I could step in and do a better job. I did and still do respect the difficulty of the role. Was my choice the traditional one? No. Is the only reason to choose to do something differently a belief that the traditional method is bad? No -- at least not in my mind.

I don't believe that the on-site and on-line elements of a broadcast should necessarily be seperate. I also don't think it's inappropriate for a tournament coordinator to say "okay, we are going to take on the responsibility for inviting commentators as well". I am not offering those as reasons for my decision, but feel they are relevant elements of the position from which I view things.

I truly regret that some people have felt offended by the decision, or believe that it was made in a different spirit than what I have expressed. My reasons were honest (whether or not that is accepted by all), but I apologize to those who have seen this in a different light. It is unfortunate that certain commentators have chosen not to participate, but that is their right and I respect their decision.

Susan

Susan, this is a very eloquent post.

Unfortunately, I also don't think you are being very forthcoming in stating why you made your decision. I think it would be a nice gesture if you disclosed the reasons why you wanted to coordinate the vugraph instead of Roland.

Having said that, I fully support BBO's policy about letting tournament organizers run the VG. However, given the fact that the Bermuda Bowl and other high-profile tournaments have deferred to Roland, I'm still curious on why the Cavendish chooses to be different.