[Walddk]

Team Canada (Eric Kokish, George Mittelman, Fred Gitelman and Geoff Hampson, USA) have made it to the triangular semi-finals in the prestigious Yeh Brothers Cup in Hangzhou, China.

Italy1 (Bocchi-Duboin, Buratti-Lanzarotti, Ferraro-D'Avossa) are already in the final with no losses in the knockout phase. Team Canada and two Chinese teams from Shanghai will compete for the last berth after one loss each (the format is double elimination). The winners of the round robin will meet the Italians in the final, and the losers go to a playoff for 3rd place.

We are still hoping to broadcast from the semi-finals and final starting at 9:00 pm New York, 03:00 Paris, 11:00 am Tuesday Sydney, but don't be too hopeful. It may not happen, since I did not yet receive any info regarding an improved connection from China.

Roland

[luke warm]

go canada!!

[twcho]

The Yeh Brothers Cup is being broadcasted in Chinese Bridge Website. And I heard someone said that the reason for not broadcasting in BBO is that the hand data is stored in a different format which cannot be adopted by BBO. Is that true?

[geller]

Quote

I heard someone said that the reason for not broadcasting in BBO is that the hand data is stored in a different format which cannot be adopted by BBO. Is that true?

I doubt it, because the BBO vugraph can handle just about any hands file format provided that BBO is given a sample of the format in advance.

If you look here you can see the organizers are having big internet connectivity problems.
http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?sho...t=0&#entry63404

[fred]

twcho, on Apr 18 2005, 11:24 PM, said:

The Yeh Brothers Cup is being broadcasted in Chinese Bridge Website. And I heard someone said that the reason for not broadcasting in BBO is that the hand data is stored in a different format which cannot be adopted by BBO. Is that true?

The tournament organizers did have an old version of windup (the program used to create the .dup file which is the most common format that vugraph operators use to tell BBO which deals are being used). However, this real why there was no vugraph from Hangzhou.

It would have been trivial to update to the latest version of windup via download.

There was no vugraph because the Internet connection from Hangzhou was very unreliable. Often several minutes would go by without any data arriving and those kind of conditions make it impossible to have a vugraph broadcast. This state of affairs was not the fault of the tournament organizers, the playing site, or BBO. The problem was a general one that was impacting all Internet traffic between that part of China and North America (which is where our server is based).

This problem became apparent the day before the tournament actually started. I discussed it with the organizers and we decided to cancel all broadcasts until connectivity improved. Unfortuantely it never did.

It was a wonderful tournament and I'm sorry that that the BBO membership did not get a chance to watch it, but the problem was beyond the control of the organizers, the hotel staff, and BBO itself.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com