[tabaresort]

Hi,
at local club director put the boards on the wrong tables giving the following:

11.5 tables 24 boards in play

On Boards 21 and 22 these pairs were given ave+ 60% each
4 vs 9
5 s 11
9 vs 8
10 vs 10
11 vs 12

On boards 23 and 24 these pairs were given 60% except for E\W pair 7 when the score was 60%/65%.
4 vs 8
5 vs 10
9 vs 7
10 vs 9
11 vs 11




Can these results stand and masterpoints be given?
Is ave+ the correct decision?
Can 60%/65% be correct?

[ArtK78]

Doesn't seem right to me.

When a pair cannot receive a valid score on a board due to something that happens at the table (such as some irregularity by the pair's opponents) and through no fault of its own, it is not unreasonable to assign an Average Plus result (60% or the pair's actual percentage, whichever is higher). However, under these facts, it would be sufficient to assign any pair that was not able to play any of these boards an Average (50% or the pair's actual percentage, whichever is higher). It is unfair to the rest of the field to give 60% to all of the pairs that did not play the board.

[mycroft]

Were the boards unplayable? Yes.
Were the boards unplayable through no fault of the pairs? Yes.
The Laws tell us to award A+ (60% or session percentage) in that case.

Is it fair? Probably not. But remember, these pairs have missed the chance to get a top through no fault of their own.

Other note: A= or session average is not a Lawful artificial adjusted score.

60%/65% is almost certainly an artifact of A+ - E/W 7 had a 65% session average, so aren't damaged. *usually* that gets taken out by an A- to the opponents (which would have been 35% (40% or 100-session average of opponents, whichever is lower), but this time it isn't.

I'm not sure what happened though. I would have thought that the boards were playable, at least once; and we should be in L15 territory - where the board played the first time with the wrong pairs gets their result, and the board that should have been played at the correct time gets A+. Which does mean there are going to be a lot of them, but that happens too.

If the boards were just wrong, as a TD, why not just keep them that way? I'm assuming it's just one set of boards - in which case, "I'm sorry, you will be getting some boards out of order. Play the ones you get, please." and let it run.

I would need to know a lot more about what happened to determine if there was a better way of running the game than what the TD decided to do - but what he did was correct with the judgement he used on how to make it work.

[jh51]

I encountered something similar to this once in a special game (a charity event to honor a bridge icon who had died). As in this case, there were an odd number of pairs. Each east-west had a sit-out. In this case, part of the problem was the geography within the room made the movement of boards non-obvious between table 1, the sit-out table (the highest numbered table), and the highest numbered table with a North-South. The final NS was, from the beginning, taking their boards from table 1 and passing them to the sit-out table instead of the reverse. This should have been causght very quickly, but it was not. As a result, EW pairs would eventually encounter a board that they had encountered before.

The TD instructed the affected EW to try to play the hand as normally as possible to obtain a normal result. The problem I encountered (as once of the EW pairs) was that the second NS may not have bid or played as did the first NS. Thus may have been inferences the second time that were not available the first time. If we got a better result on the second play, the assumption was that we had taken advantage of our prior knowledge (not necessarily intentionally) and NS got an A+. (We were told before we played that we would get only the score from the first play of the board in any case.) I guess this was fair, given the number of affected boards, but on at least one of the boards where I was involved, the second NS earned their poorer result.

At the time, I felt that the NS that caused this mess should have received a PP for having messed up the movement, but it did not happen.

[blackshoe]

I ran a club game a while ago where I wanted to give PPs to virtually everybody for various screwups to the scoring. I didn't, though. The club owner would probably have shot me.

[Vampyr]

mycroft, on 2012-January-30, 11:28, said:

If the boards were just wrong, as a TD, why not just keep them that way? I'm assuming it's just one set of boards - in which case, "I'm sorry, you will be getting some boards out of order. Play the ones you get, please." and let it run.

It sounds as if a bye-stand was left out, in which case the above would not be possible.

[blackshoe]

mycroft, on 2012-January-30, 11:28, said:

60%/65% is almost certainly an artifact of A+ - E/W 7 had a 65% session average, so aren't damaged. *usually* that gets taken out by an A- to the opponents (which would have been 35% (40% or 100-session average of opponents, whichever is lower), but this time it isn't.

That's true only in North America. In the rest of the world, the opponents would get the lesser of their session average on the rest of the boards or 40%, independent of what the A+ side gets.