Online Bridge is more tiring than F2F Bridge

30 Jun 2020 1213h

(Disclaimer: Views below are entirely my own and do not represent the views of SCBA or any other organization.)

It’s coming to the end of June and it has already been more than 4 months since the start of DORSCON Orange and the closure of the SCBA Clubhouse. Throughout this whole period we’ve been running free tournaments online on BBO. From an organizer/TD POV, the experience has really been less than ideal. Some of these are BBO-specific, some are not.

Great Expectations…

The average player seems to expect/think the following:

Basically, players (not all) seem to be expecting a better experience, more features, for lower or no cost.

This is nothing new, and is a common theme for any form of digital transformation. Sad to say, this is one bad aspect of my career that actually transfers over to bridge as well.

Reality 1: The experience on the side of an organizer/TD

Setting Up

Most of us with tournament creation rights are limited to one tournament at any given time. In practice this means on Wednesdays I have to wait till the afternoon tournament (for CSC) finishes at 5.30pm to set up the 8.30pm tournament for SCBA. Tournaments start showing up 2 hours to the start, so if I am busy with work, you can be sure I will get flooded with messages by 7pm.

Registration

In a physical club game, you can control who is able to play easily. Not so easy on BBO, where I only have the following options:

So, to limit to Singapore players, I could just select “Include players from the Host’s country” right?

Except, there are Singapore-based players who are not citizens and still use their own country’s flag, or Singaporeans who are not based in Singapore but have used their current country of residence’s flag. Or, even Singapore players who wish to play with their non-Singaporean friends.

Which means now I have to include a custom list, and deal with requests from people who fall into the above categories. So I include instructions to email the competitions secretary address or send me a message on BBO. Straightforward right?

No. Instead you have people who try to call me. People who SMS me. People who email me at my personal address. The record goes to a player (a young-ish, expert level player) who first messaged me on Telegram (which rightfully got ignored), SMS (ditto), and finally two days before hit the jackpot of messaging me correctly on BBO.

Well, at least he gave me time to sort it out. Can’t say the same about players who message me less than two minutes before the tournament saying they can’t get in. It takes time for me to actually enter the names into the include list and then update the tournament again (yes, because the BBO interface is unresponsive and not intuitive like that).

Don’t understand why I have the email or BBO message rule? These are the two places where any requests are unlikely to get buried by other messages. I am not going to carry the mental load of having to remember requests coming in and getting seen when I’m not able to immediately make the add.

But back to BBO - there is simply no good way of membership management for tournaments.

Movements

I’ve also had to explain multiple times that I have no control over the movements BBO uses. For other TDs, the movement changes weirdly for more than 32 pairs, which results in multiple sections and repeats.

Swiss would be nice, but I’ve avoided Swiss movements after tournaments crashed twice in the first 3 weeks, due to server load and Swiss movements being significantly more taxing than non-Swiss movements.

Adjusting Scores/Other TD Functions

There is no good way to check scores at other tables if you need to look at how the play went on a certain board when considering rulings. The “hack” is to look up player results and enter the name of every North player.

Additionally, these are the handicaps TDs have on BBO:

Again, it is also difficult to adjust unfinished boards at the end of the tournament. There is only a 20 minute correction window, and when there is heavy server load, the results don’t even load on the tournament history website.

The “hack” again is to look up player results and enter the name of every North player. Of course, if these results don’t load (which happens during heavy server load), you are out of luck.

Posting Scores to Web

BBO has results on their website under Tournament History, but has until recently been limited to just a week.

Short of writing a scraper (using Selenium for example) and saving the results, there’s no real good solution. After work, and time spent actually running tournaments and other administrative tasks, I don’t have any energy or willpower left to work on this.

Reality 2: Player Behaviour

I’ve already illustrated some of this under registration above, which should give you an idea of what we’re dealing with.

Ragequitting

Only a pair guilty of this to date (and banned for good), but this meant an additional sit-out for the rest of the tournament.

Disconnects

Not so much on the player who disconnected, but usually the opponents’ reactions. I’ve received TD calls from both opponents, and on one occasion even the partner of the disconnected player.

I can understand a TD call if someone at the table has been disconnected for 3-5 minutes, but majority of the calls are right as soon as a player turns red, and most of the time the player reconnects within the next 20 seconds. Most of the time also, the players manage to finish the boards for the round.

And really, other than giving an Average+ adjustment for any boards unplayed by the end of the round, what are you expecting the TD to do? Go to the player’s house and fix his internet? I actually had to ask this to a qualified TD (who came to PM me on Telegram about a disconnect that I was already ware of), believe it or not!

Cheating

This is hard to prove, and thus far we’ve only had one pair where the evidence was substantial enough for us to be convinced. Said pair were also totally unknown (no names in profile, claims of membership to a club were proven false, no one else knows who they are), and threatened to send an email to their club convenor (who does not know them) and SCBA to complain. Spoiler alert: no such complaint ever arrived.

For a game which is free, has no prizes, masterpoints or any other reward, it seems pretty lame to resort to cheating.

Impatience/General Bad Behaviour

These are lumped together as impatience is usually the underlying cause. Usually, this happens when a player takes some time to think, and opponents get unhappy and call TD or start throwing accusations at the table.

Exhibit A: Last board of a 3 board round with 7 minutes left on the clock, declarer says “thinking”. Not one minute later, opponents start getting impatient, and accuses declarer of cheating. At which point I get called. Said accusor received a warning from me and apologised for his poor behaviour.

This whole thing was captured on declarer’s partner delayed livestream on twitch.

Exhibit B: I get called to a table, and get told that a particular playing is not playing. Upon arriving at the table, the opening leader was actually questioning if a bid is weak or strong, and the declaring side were not answering her question, instead saying things like “we told you already”. I told the declaring side to please explain (because “jump shift” does not say anything about the strength), and dummy decided to double down and call her opponents “bad players”.

With players like this, I sometimes wonder if I have accidentally stumbled onto my mother’s career of a kindergarten teacher.

How many players actually remember that these online weekly games we host on BBO are free, and the TDs running them are not getting paid? We started these so people would still be able to get their bridge fix, out of goodwill. Unfortunately through some of the messages I receive, there is no “please” or “thank you” and there is this expectation from these players that the online games are their entitlement. It’s behaviour like these that makes me want to pull to plug on these games.

Upcoming Changes to BBO

BBO has recently announced an end to the current tournament creation rights. Likely these are going to be replaced by paid licenses. Details have yet to be announced, but I’m not holding my breath.

The one thing going for BBO now is the fact that tournament creation is still free. Charging for the rights to host tournaments will increase the expectations on our part as tournament organizers. Will we get better tools and support? Hopefully this will be the case, but I’m pessimistic given the weak response BBO has given so far, e.g. it took them 3 months to address the server load issues.

Conclusion

I had hoped that perhaps, Singapore bridge players are just a bit special, that my struggles are somehow limited. However, Ant sent me an article link during a chat a couple of months ago written by an Australian TD outlining similar frustrations. While it’s sad to read, I did feel somewhat relieved that I’m not the “crazy one”.

Technology can be improved, but will player attitudes mature to make the experience better for everyone?