Missed board on BBO
In our game last night, playing seven rounds of three boards, there were a couple of times when BBO refused to allow a board to start because it was too late in the round, and as a result some people played 20 boards and some people played 21 boards. The scoring method was cross-imps.
The reason for the delay was not always clear but there is no dispute that connection problems were a positive contributor.
Should the final scores be adjusted?
There is clearly a rationale for factoring their game total by 5% when there were only 20 boards played.
An alternative is to handle the missed board by some element of AV+ or AV= or AV-? And if so, which one and what is AV+ in the context of cross-imping with 3 other tables?
Do those concerned get whichever approach benefits them most?
Comments
BBO should have awarded Av= automatically and your final results don't need adjusting (both sides are deemed to get 0 IMPs on the board). If anything, if one side lost connection, strict applications of the rules would suggest that they should get Av- and the non-offending side Av+, but 50/50 seems to be relatively standard practice.
I think that in theory, if the connection is lost due to an issue on the player's side, the result should be Av-/Av+; and if the connection loss is due to an issue on BBO's side or due to Internet conditions in between, the result should be Av+/Av+. In practice, though, it can be impossible to tell these two cases apart. It does seem important for pairs who weren't at fault to be given the extra IMPs, to compensate them for only having 20 comparisons rather than 21, so I'd probably be inclined to be generous here unless there were indications that a particular player's technology was at fault (especially given that I suspect that these incidents normally stem from something at BBO's end, a situation that's similar in nature to a director's error).
At cross-imps, to implement Av+/Av/Av- scores, you take the pairs concerned out of the comparisons (i.e. score the board as if they weren't playing), and give them 2/0/-2 IMPs per comparison for the board respectively (WB 8.12.3).
In principle it's a board lost due to slow play, admittedly due to the system. So Av= (50/50) as standard. Av- / Av+ if you decide one pair is to blame, either because of time lost to a disconnect or if the table log shows one side was substantially slower (I usually check this, most of the time both pairs have used time).
I have gone with the relevant pairs score 0 imps on the board in question, but cannot help feeling it is anomalous, as were there a half table and they had to sit out a board because of that their score would surely be factored in accordance with the number of boards played ...
All methods of scoring deal differently with scheduled sitouts and no result on a board scheduled to be played.