[jillybean]

pescetom, on 2024-August-03, 15:01, said:

Do not let untrained people use the machine.

Funny that you say this.
After 2 weeks of having the Dealing Machine sitting on my dinning room table, the powers that be have decided that the DM must be used and stored on site. I duly returned the DM.
Stay tuned

[mycroft]

Yes, please keep it clean. I'm not as paranoid as some in the Ajijic club, who expected that we would clean the rollers and camera every day, but I spent about 90 minutes over the course of one sectional weekend cleaning rollers on a different dealing machine. And it helped, but it was horrid. Once a week, or every 10 sets or so, makes a nice compromise.

Be prepared to replace decks of cards about twice as often as you were, as they fade a bit and get harder for the dealing machine to read them. If you have boards that are hand-shuffled in play, you can migrate the dead decks to those (and avoid hand-shuffling the dealer cards, that wears them out faster yet!)

(and remember, unless your club is partial to cake at the table, almost all of that crud on the rollers - and being pushed back on the cards - is dead human skin. Deal with that as you will.)

[blackshoe]

Audrey Grant, giving a seminar on how to run a club at a regional: "Don't serve food".
Local club owner: "That's not going to happen".

[mycroft]

Don't serve sticky food. Pretty simple.

And I have to change my line about club directing now because of Keurig: "It doesn't matter if your games run to time, with perfect seeding and movements, and world-champtionship level directing. If the coffee isn't ready before the first player arrives, you're a bad director." Ah well, the point is still obvious.

[pescetom]

mycroft, on 2024-August-04, 11:23, said:

If the coffee isn't ready before the first player arrives, you're a bad director."

And what about "if the coffee isn't as good as the local bar, you're a bad club" (but don't blame the director who already pointed it out to the powers that be).

[mycroft]

Ah, well, yes. But since the beer prices were half what they were anywhere else, people would come in just to kibitz a few hands and have a drink(*). The coffee wasn't quite as big a draw.

Of course, there was always the danger they might end up having to play for their beer (including "can you cover the next couple of rounds so that I can get the game in?" pre Bridgemates). So not an unalloyed advantage...

(*) Seriously, I bought the room a drink the day I got my last long-term job (and a 85% raise). 8 tables and the director, came to CAD30.

[jillybean]

"Do not let untrained people use the machine."

Unfortunately, this is mexactly what is happening. I wonder how long it will last.

The game is turning into a monster. We have 100 players registered for the weekly game, and often have 1 or 2 pairs drop in.
I will have to study these movements and muster up the courage to try something other than mitchells.

Or better still, Mycroft, next time you are in Vancouver, keep a Wednesday free and come help us set up some nifty movements.

[mycroft]

Well, I was going to be in Vancouver last April, if it wasn't for that little issue with tax evasion :-)

Spoiler

Nothing to do with bridge or any of the players - the venue for the Regional was playing very fast and loose with "charity" status.

[blackshoe]

27 replies over 50 days to this "quick question".

[jillybean]

You know there is no such thing as a quick question in Bridge
You ask what you think is a simple question and find you are only just scratching the surface.
That is why we love this game.

[jillybean]

2 months in, and the rumours are circulating. This player is smart enough to query the rumours.


"The actual percentage scores for most pairs were lower - would that have something to do with the degree of difficulty of the hands? Would the automatic dealer machine have had some say in this?!"

[pescetom]

jillybean, on 2024-September-26, 18:28, said:

2 months in, and the rumours are circulating. This player is smart enough to query the rumours.


"The actual percentage scores for most pairs were lower - would that have something to do with the degree of difficulty of the hands? Would the automatic dealer machine have had some say in this?!"

It depends upon whether you previously had computer-dealt hands which were manually duplicated, or manually dealt hands.
If the former (as we had before the machine finally arrived) then the rumours are either nonsense or unrelated.
If the latter, then presumably the actual percentage scores for the other pairs are higher, due to their superior ability to bid random deals... one step towards better bridge in this club.

[jillybean]

Previously, shuffle, deal, play.

[mycroft]

SDP suffers from insufficient shuffling and flatter boards. Poor shuffling leads to honour clumps (from "run the clubs" hands), especially if the players don't shuffle their cards after the last round (or at all).

Players who have spent their life with SDP hands learn to play the percentages, and score worse when 4-1 splits, say, happen twice as often than they're used to (at the true statistical frequency) until they get a feel for "real life".

Players who have been playing "those d-ed computer hands" for 35 years have less problems with it (but there definitely was an issue when it became standard to throw out the half-page hands for the players to build. "To start the game, move the boards down 2 tables" - is that a memory for anyone else? Hopefully not a good one :-).

I still get about two questions a year about "how they select the hands for tournaments".