[CSGibson]

ACBL members may know that a resolution was passed by the board of directors over the summer allowing NAP contests to be held online if a district chooses. Today (Sunday the 27th) District 20 will hold its flight A NAP trials online. Kibitzers are welcome. The trials start at 3PM EST/12PM PST/8PM GMT, and will continue over two sessions. This is district 20 of the ACBL. Notable pairs include Marc Zwerling and Mark Tolliver, who have finished 2nd in the Blue Ribbons playing together, and, of possible interest to BBO Forumers, myself and Chris Wiegand.

Trials will not be on viewgraph; they will be in the tournament section of BBO.

[CSGibson]

Also, I assume I will post problem hands from these sets afterwards. Feel free to publicly mock any decisions I made.

[GreenMan]

Will you know your MP score as you go along, barometer-style? I like barometer scoring, but it's rare in F2F games. I'm curious to see if they use it here; I think it would be a first for a district NAP qualifier.

[CSGibson]

No, they did not let anyone know their matchpoint score until the end. We wound up 3rd, 4th place was 1/100th of a match point behind us, 2nd was 3.2 matchpoints ahead of us. I made mistakes enough to have cost us money for sure, and probably first place. Not sure if we are going to Dallas or not, yet; I might hold a bake sale or carwash .

[kenberg]

I watched a fair amount of the first half and some of the second. I don't watch all of the Bermuda Bowl so I would call it quite a bit of watching by my standards. It was good bridge, i hope you have time to post a few hands.

If I recall correctly you beat 1♥X for 800 while another table played 3NT making with an overtrick or so, for a good board for you. Results on this board varied a great deal, I think.

Anyway, I hope this can be done more in the future, it was very enjoyable. It was good that you posted, else I doubt I would have noted it in the list of tournaments.

[diana_eva]

kenberg, on 2013-October-28, 05:57, said:

...

Anyway, I hope this can be done more in the future, it was very enjoyable. It was good that you posted, else I doubt I would have noted it in the list of tournaments.

It was announced in BBO News too. Shows how much BBOers read our news lol

[kenberg]

News? Read? Who does that? We just post.

[DJNeill]

How did you like the online format, proctored?

[kenberg]

I assume you are asking the players but as a kib I noticed something that perhaps could be improved.

When the director is called, it would be good if he could click something and bring everything to a halt. If a director is called to a table in f2f, everything stops at the moment of the call. But everyone hears the call. Online, especially if some of the players are more used to playing f2f, that doesn't always happen. They are looking at cards, not the chat. The director was clearly frustrated at times by this.

On one hand (see added below) it made a huge difference. After 1♦ -(?)-2♦(inverted), second hand asked for an undo. I think but I am not sure the request was even before the 2♦ call, but at any rate it was before his partner called. Second hand summoned a director. But the auction proceeded with two more passes. I forget what the ? call was. So the auction was 1♦-(?, undo please)-2♦ inverted-pass-pass. The director ruled that since both sides had bid after the director call, he was throwing out the board. This was a very fortunate ruling for the opening side as they were cold for 3NT as the cards lay, and I think it was reached at several tables.

Mostly when I play online, I keep a sense of humor. It's a game. But a NAP qualifier is serious and it would be good if technology could be used productively here. Maybe a director call freezes the board so no further bid or play is possible until the director arrives? Or the undo request freezes it? Or something.

Added: The 1♦ was third hand. Otherwise the pass of 2♦ would be inexplicable.

[GreenMan]

kenberg, on 2013-October-28, 07:53, said:

On one hand it made a huge difference. After 1♦ -(?)-2♦(inverted), second hand asked for an undo. I think but I am not sure the request was even before the 2♦ call, but at any rate it was before his partner called. Second hand summoned a director. But the auction proceeded with two more passes. I forget what the ? call was. So the auction was 1♦-(?, undo please)-2♦ inverted-pass-pass. The director ruled that since both sides had bid after the director call, he was throwing out the board. This was a very fortunate ruling for the opening side as they were cold for 3NT as the cards lay, and I think it was reached at several tables.

I saw a board where something similar happened but the ruling was different. Second hand doubled, then (apparently) asked for undo, then called the director, but the auction continued. The director arrived and asked everyone to stop bidding, then rolled the auction back to second hand's call, at which point s/he passed. The director said that the withdrawn calls were AI for one side and UI for the other, and things went on unremarkably.

Clearly there are kinks to work out. I like kenberg's suggestion for the software.

[CSGibson]

DJNeill, on 2013-October-28, 07:13, said:

How did you like the online format, proctored?

Before I say anything, I have to disclose information which may inform my opinion. First of all, I am part of the district 20 NAP/GNT committee responsible for advising and helping the D20 NAP/GNT coordinator when putting on these events. Secondly, I was the person to originally suggest the online format for the GNTs, and I wrote the initial proposal for how the event should be run that was sent to the district board when they approved the format. I have also served as a proctor for the GNTs, and participated in three online GNT competitions (two open, one flight B) to go along with this NAP experience.

I thought it went reasonably well, for the most part. The first time you do anything like this there will be kinks, and this was no exception to that general rule. We held our flight B & C competition on Saturday, and players had trouble registering for the tournament, with the alert procedure, and posting online convention cards. People also reportedly dropped off the network every once in a while.

Previously our district had done a 3-site NAP, with the winner from each site (Northern Oregon, Northern California, and Hawaii) going on to the nationals. This was kind of horrible for many reasons, and it was worsened when our district added a 4th playing site in Boise, ID; now the top 3 winners by percentage would be going to the nationals, but they would not play anybody from different playing sites, and the number of players (as well as the talent of the players) was not distributed equally between the four sites, so that it was possible that the best pairs would all be at the same site, but not get to nationals because the strength of the field was so much greater at that site.

Proctored online play was a godsend to solve this problem. Personally, I don't find it anywhere near as enjoyable as face to face bridge, and I don't think I play as well online - I've developed some table feel over the years, but it is harder to employ online. Also, I miss the social aspect - we had to rush through boards. Its harder to get questions answered - my partner and I were frequently asking private questions, but people were not concentrating on the chat box, and it was hard for them to notice since it was encouraged to have the sound off (it was irritating to have swish, swish, swish through 8 computers at the same playing site as cards were played).

Proctored online play also allowed some cross-region pairings - in fact, the pair that beat us out for 2nd (by less than 4 matchpoints) had a player from Portland and a player from Honolulu, something that has never happened before in our district because of the distance issues.

The open flight pairs had many fewer problems, but the attendance was way down because of the negative backlash against online play and because it was poorly advertised that you needed to pre-register two weeks in advance, something that was never required for our district in face to face play. The latter issue probably has more to do with the timing of the acbl approval in august relative to our competition date, and will obviously get better with time as it becomes expected.

Overall I was pleased with the results, but I still will look forward to playing meaningful competitions face to face at nationals, should we elect to go.

[Jacki]

The GNT events which we have been doing for several years now also had some problems to begin with, typically involving players not knowing what to do. However, in that case we had several months to work out kinks. Still, the first start-up game always was nerve-wracking for the directors trying to get the players online and get the game started. Once started, putting aside the 'normal' disconnecting issues, the GNT events were held with very few problems.

The NAP that was just held here gave us a much shorter time period in order to get everything together. As these large prestigious events happen, we learn things that we can do to make it easier on the players, the directors and the sponsors/organizers of the events. This last event, the D20 NAP has shown us (Us=Uday) the programming changes we can make in order to have the start be on time - more or less, but certainly not 30+ minutes - and that has been the problem that has given everyone, players, directors and BBO the most angst.

In addition to the programming changes Uday will make, there are things the rest of the staff can do (rest=me) to make sure that the participants know how to get here, what to do once they get here and how to actually play in a game.

The main point of this post is to let everyone know that we appreciate feedback, we see some problems that we can fix and if we've missed some then let us know. We are happy to have had the GNTs here on BBO and hope to see more NAP qualification events happening in the future. I believe by 2014, D20 will see a big improvement in the problems they had this weekend. From my end, I thought considering everything it went well. It was certainly interesting to kibitz.

Jacki

[jillybean]

This is something I'd like to see our district explore.

I was interested to see the players had an ACBL convention card loaded and were not using the BBO FD. How was this done?

[ArtK78]

I certainly hope they were not using full disclosure ccs. I hate those. One thing I never want to see is a pop-up of an explanation of perfectly normal, standard bids. It is incredibly distracting.

If there was one thing that would drive away first-time players on BBO it would be the pop-ups that result from using full disclosure ccs.

[barmar]

jillybean, on 2013-October-29, 09:26, said:

I was interested to see the players had an ACBL convention card loaded and were not using the BBO FD. How was this done?

BBO has had ACBL convention cards for years.

[jillybean]

Yes, how do you use a CC (any CC) without using full disclosure.
I thought the FD part was mandatory.

[ArtK78]

jillybean, on 2013-October-30, 16:53, said:

Yes, how do you use a CC (any CC) without using full disclosure.
I thought the FD part was mandatory.

Full Disclosure is the name of a BBO convention card. You have to input the meanings of all of your routine sequences. When you use the FD convention card, the meanings of the most routine bids pop up on the screen. It is very annoying.

[jillybean]

I did not know BBO supported a passive CC, after FD was implemented I thought that was the engine and all CCs were handled that way.

[jeffford76]

jillybean, on 2013-October-29, 09:26, said:

This is something I'd like to see our district explore.

Not sure why you think they haven't already done so. My understanding is that after the exploration they decided that the current format better suited most of the players. The district web page has contact information for the GNT/NAP coordinator if you want more information.

[jillybean]

jeffford76, on 2013-October-31, 08:29, said:

Not sure why you think they haven't already done so. My understanding is that after the exploration they decided that the current format better suited most of the players. The district web page has contact information for the GNT/NAP coordinator if you want more information.

I haven't heard anything, which doesn't mean they haven't looked into it. I wonder what the D19 players from Alaska think about it.