blackshoe, on 2015-January-14, 09:31, said:
If players are slow, giving them one minute to finish a board isn't enough. They will run over. In fact, IME, give them three minutes and they will run over by five minutes. Since they're now most of a board late, and mostly incapable of catching up, they'll continue to be late the rest of the session.
There are basically two reasons for slow play:
A board may have required particularly careful play (by either side) or a lengthy, complex auction.
One or more players are inherently slow.
The slow boards are incidents. They will statisitically be offset by fast boards. We play 3 boards a round in 21 minutes. The last time I played, there were two slow boards in the same round that took together 20 minutes. The third board went 1NT-4NT;6NT, opening lead, claim 12 tricks, losing only a missing ace, and was scored up with more than enough time to laugh about it.
The slow boards are not the problem. The slow players are. But you can do a few things to speed up players.
- Time penalties. This is actually an area where penalties work: The rules are clear, there is no judgement involved on how they should be applied. (Compare that to a UI case, where a player may do his best to be ethical, judge wrong in a mentally complex situation, and is so readily slapped with a PP for 'flagrant use of UI', no matter how hard he tried to do the right thing.) There is a clock for everyone to see. Playing slow is a sign of arrogance and disrespect to other players, as well as the TD, and deserves to be penalized.
- There are several things that make people slow... and most of them are not slow play. Typical things slow players do, that cost minutes per board and have nothing to do with the play, are:
- Discussing while their opponents are waiting. This is rude in itself, but it slows down the play too. I have timed players who easily take 4 minutes before they get the cards out of the first board.
- Discussions after the play. Post-mortems can be fun, but most of the post-mortems are between two defenders arguing across the table about who should have prevented that second overtrick against 4♠, while dummy is asking declarer why he didn't go to slam. Everyone is talking and no one is listening.
- Procedures: Slow players have a procedure for everything. First all the bidding cards need to be removed (even if regulations state otherwise), then the contract needs to be entered on the score card, then they need to select their opening lead, then they need to enter the the opening lead on their score card, then the dummy is put down. These procedures are a horror to anyone who has even understood the most rudimentary concepts of time and project management.
They can easily cost minutes per board.
So, you need to teach players efficient procedures: write down the contract and opening lead, after you made it while dummy is putting his cards down, then put your bidding cards away. After the board is finished, everybody puts their cards back into the board. North and East take care of the scoring. South takes care of the boards and puts the next board on the table. Typically West is the first one to take the cards out of the next board, then South. It can also help some players when you teach them how to sort their cards efficiently. (Don't forget to mention it when you see a player improving in any of these areas!)
Stop them from discussing when there are still boards to be played. (When they talk after the boards, they will have the same amount of time to talk as when they talk before the boards.)
Point out to them that holding up the game is a nuisance to everyone, and therefore plain and simply rude and asocial, and that you will penalize for rude and asocial behavior.
The way we go about slow play at our club is:
- After the round is over, there is one minute of "grace time". Every table that has not entered their score after the grace time is considered slow.
- If a table is slow, the time keeper (in our case, a lightning fast playing elementary school teacher of the stricter kind
) will ask the players whether someone wants to take the blame for the slow play. My rough guess is that 3 times out of 4 nobody takes the blame, while one time out of 4 someone says: "I was slow on the second board." If no one takes the blame, both pairs get a slow play warning. If a pair takes the blame, only they get the slow play warning. There is no discussion about who was slow (that would only take more time). If there is any discussion, everyone is to blame. (It does happen regularly that a player tells the time keeper during the next round that he was to blame, obviously that is taken into account.)
- The second slow play warning is an automatic penalty of 10% of a board. The third slow play warning costs 20%. (I can't recall that we have ever given one.) For clarity: the fact that you were arriving late because your table was slow the previous round is no excuse for being late again.
- In addition, if the slow play was by more than 5 minutes (i.e. 4 minutes + 1 minute "grace time"), there is no warning. The penalty is automatic.
These are simple, transparent rules. The players can easily see when they are breaking them. This makes it easy to enforce them, and players accept their time penalties graceously, since they know that the time keeper is only doing the administration (and that you don't mess with this lady). The "grace time" and the fact that you are only warned for the first minor violation work as an efficient filter: They ensure that players are not penalized for an odd sequence of difficult
boards, and make sure that slow
players are targeted.
Rik
I want my opponents to leave my table with a smile on their face and without matchpoints on their score card - in that order.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!), but “That’s funny…” – Isaac Asimov
The only reason God did not put "Thou shalt mind thine own business" in the Ten Commandments was that He thought that it was too obvious to need stating. - Kenberg
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