Recording bidding sequence in Bridgemate II

Ian_Hines

I enabled the "record bidding" functionality and then ran a test tournament which worked. Now I'm not sure how I can extract and publish the bidding sequences. Can anyone help please? Thanks.

CMOT_Dibbler

Hi Ian, interesting question very thought provoking and I was hoping someone would take the "plunge". Ok probably put my foot in it but here goes. This isn't a full answer so bear with me. A couple of rehtorical question first "why would any club want to record the bidding sequence for anything from 5 to 18 tables when it is likely to add a load of time to the evening/match". "Will every North want to input all that data?"

OK when the bidding goes into the Control system it is recorded in a Database along with other information and database has an extention of ".bws". They can be opened by Access (according to Bridgemates Developers Guide) once you have found them. The database contains 14 Tables so you will have to be able to extract the data using Access and prepare "Reports" in access then understand how to "show" them. I am not sure if EBUScore shows on the "Reports" page that the bidding can be extracted. There is nothing about this in Jeff Smiths very good Guide on what was EBUScore so I don't think anything can be done there. I have had a look at other manuals online and whilst some mention that bidding can be inputted (Bridge Scorers) there is no indication has to how it is extracted or made available for the players.

So there might be an answer but I think you will have to check other scoring programs manuals to see how they do it, if at all. Will be interested if anyone else has any other ideas.

CMOT

P.S. a lot of respect for giving it a go and "playing" with the systems as it is the only way we learn.

JeffreyS

Thanks for trying this Ian....I have never addressed eith the bidding or play data recording from the system... though it could be useful for recording in an international match wherein there may be a writeup afterwards. The BiddingData (and PlayData) will be stored in the BCS Database file (bws)...so it will just be a matter of extracting that from the bws file into a readable form.

Ian_Hines

Thanks Guys. I progressed this a little further.

Firstly to respond to the "Won't it add a lot of time" point - we are a fairly new club and we don't have the funds for a dealing machine but we wanted to be able to analyze the deals after the match. There seemed to be two choices - create hands in Dealmaster and then pre-deal them or deal the hands at the start of the event and record them using the Bridgemate II's. We went for the second option and it is really fast. At the end of the hand the contract result is entered and then each player lays out their hand in suits. North then inputs the North, East and South hands and the Bridgemate presents the West hand to be confirmed. North has one key press per card and one key press to move to the next suit so 13 + 3 per hand (once all 13 cards are in the system moves on to the next hand without a further keypress). That's 48 key presses plus one for the Accept - 49 per board. Sounds a lot but our players got it in week 1 and were far better by week 2 - in fact they seem to relish it! So my point is recording the bidding is a small overhead and easily manageable. The other big plus of this approach is that the players do the work and there is no overhead on the organizer/director. One further advantage is that HANDS and ANALYSIS buttons are enabled on the Bridgemate II. (Actually any club can enable them by uploading the .dup file to the server).

Regarding the database. I had to learn quickly .... I located the database and opened it in Access. The bidding sequences were recorded and available. I created a simple report and am able to extract the bidding sequences. What I need to do now is improve the usability - I suspect most people will be interested in the bidding sequence on just a few hands and they will want to compare to other sequences on the same hand so I need to sort by hand (easy) and link to player names (less easy). I am thinking it will probably be easier to extract the data to an Excel spreadsheet and set up a query there so that users can select the bidding for just one hand and have it displayed. Two reasons to go this way - firstly not many people have Access but most people have Excel, secondly easier to manipulate the data (simply because I know a lot more about spreadsheets than I do about databases). The first reason is of course the far bigger reason.

So in summary, I understand what do do now, I'm just amazed it hasn't already been done - by Bridgemate actually!

CMOT_Dibbler

Hi Ian how have you progressed?

Understand why you are doing it and agree that it works for you so you need to do it. I have been trying to get the BWS downloaded onto Openoffice base. I have retrieved the 14 tables after a struggle but no queries/reports. Just one question, I haven't been able to trace the score ( +200 when the result is say 2NT 2 down when vulnerable) is there a report for this or is it left for the scoring program to produce that numerical result?

best wishes

CMOT_Dibbler