[criptik]

A player in my tournament today had paid for a robot as a partner but then his regular partner (i.e., wife) came home and he wanted me to sub her in but the substitution never worked. Is that by design?

[sfi]

I believe it's there to stop people from paying a cheaper price for a robot and avoiding the more expensive tournament cost for a real partner.

[criptik]

sfi, on 2021-February-05, 20:00, said:

I believe it's there to stop people from paying a cheaper price for a robot and avoiding the more expensive tournament cost for a real partner.

This was a free tournament, but maybe they don't check for that.

[sfi]

criptik, on 2021-February-09, 08:01, said:

This was a free tournament, but maybe they don't check for that.

Maybe. Hopefully someone who actually knows the answer will stop by at some point, because I'm now curious.

[barmar]

I think we only implemented the ability to replace a robot with a human in the case where the robot was put in as a sub.

[ypinky]

barmar, on 2021-February-17, 13:51, said:

I think we only implemented the ability to replace a robot with a human in the case where the robot was put in as a sub.

I yesterday ran in the same issue. A player joined a tournament as 11th pair, by renting a robot, just to be able to join the tournament. During the game I tried to replace this robot by a real player, which did not succeed, very probably because the robot was not a TD-added "sub", but a player-rented "paid" robot.

I agree that the person who rented the robot should be asked by the TD first, but generally I think a TD should be permitted to replace even a paid robot by a real player.

Also (or alternatively?), it would be great if a TD could enable to automatically join one single player sitting at the partnership desk with a robot partner sub, even if that should lead to an odd number of players (more than one players at the partnership desk should be able to merge into a partnership themselves).