If you like the online results at this regional and want to know a bit more about them, this article is for you.
Would you like to see opening lead included in results? If so, consider giving the tournament manager, Roberta Grubb (robertagrubb
earthlink.net), feedback. Technically, it is completely feasible. Both the Bridgemate and BridgePad electronic scoring devices allow the opening lead to be captured and both the ACBLmerge and BridgeComposer programs can display the opening lead in their output.
As a practical matter, entering the opening leads takes a few seconds which has the potential to slow down the game. But my experience after pushing the local San Diego Bridge Academy club to capture the opening lead is that players rapidly got used to entering the opening lead and that game was not held up.
Note: cut-and-paste may not work for the Roberta’s e-mail address due to spam prevention measures.
According to an article in the March 2011 Bridge Bulletin, the ACBL is finally going to rewrite ACBLscore. So far as I know there isn’t an ACBLscore specific forum for public comments as there might be for a major civil construction project though the article does mention contacting your district director (Ken Monzingo if you’re in D22). If you like what you see in the ACBLmerge output, consider sending your comments to your district director or to the ACBL directly.
I wrote ACBLmerge because it was cool and I thought players would appreciate it. But these days I think its most important role is as an example of how things can be done. In the software world a working example is usually worth more than hours of discussion and dozens of pages of formal specifications. If you like the pop-up recap sheets, field strength calculations, masterpoint tooltip, face view, LoTT calculation and other features currently unique to ACBLmerge, let the ACBL know. It makes much more sense for them to roll these features into a new ACBLscore than to continue post processing the ACBLscore output.
The face view feature requires building a database of player photos. This could easily be made part of the main ACBL website where players could be allowed to upload their photo as part of their MyACBL Member Page after logging into the site. The ACBL doesn’t need to become Facebook but I think a small step in the social networking direction would be beneficial.
A couple of years ago, someone (Bill Arlinghaus, I think) had the great idea that the ACBL could host club results, providing an easy way for non web savvy clubs to post their game results on the internet. This feature is called Club Results. Two years ago they started integrating hands with the results using Bridge Composer after discussion with me and the Bridge Composer developer. Unfortunately, they chose not to include double dummy analysis even though both ACBLmerge and BridgeComposer do double dummy analysis. Rich DeMartino, the ACBL president at that time, was against displaying double dummy results, feeling that it confused newer players. I argued that it was simply a matter of education. My argument didn’t carry the day.
Perhaps the required computational resources were also a consideration. Double dummy analysis requires significant computation but it is not unduly burdensome and scales very well on multi-core computers. Both ACBLmerge and BridgeComposer rely on Bo Haglund’s free double dummy solver which is significantly faster than the double dummy solver in older versions of Dealmaster Pro, though the latest Dealmaster Pro 6.0 also seems to be using the Bo Haglund’s solver. I determined that a single dual quad-core rack server should meet the double dummy analysis needs for all clubs using Club Results, even if a significant fraction of clubs used the service. The server cost is probably under $2000 or about one cent per member. I think we can afford it.
If you want to see double dummy results on the Club Results pages and in the new ACBLscore output, send your comments to the ACBL.
