Card Dealing Machines
What is the cheapest / best value card dealing machine set up? What would it cost us to buy that machine plus bar coded cards (?) and service agreement (is that necessary)?
What is the cheapest / best value card dealing machine set up? What would it cost us to buy that machine plus bar coded cards (?) and service agreement (is that necessary)?
Comments
Dissapointing response (lack of) !
You could try posting the question to the Club Forum.
I will see if some at EBU can answer.
Do you use Bridgemates? If so you can do the dealing at the table in the first round and save yourslef paying anything. I demonstrated this recently at a local club and it was adopted without problem.
You can also do this with our tablet based BridgePal wireless scoring system. This can be done completely manually, identifying the cards from a hand diagram displayed on the tablet. It can alternatively be done via our BridgeDealer app, which is integrated with BridgePal and uses the tablet's front camera to recognise individual cards and indicate which hand they should be assigned to - see https://mirgo2.co.uk/bridgepal_forum/index.php?topic=253.msg749#msg749. BridgePal/BridgeDealer are free to use and work with EBUScore or any of the commonly used scoring programs.
Hi Pont
Your question covers such a wide area that I think that many will have difficult making a response. Each club probably only has experience of one machine/way of dealing cards. So, many people can't tell you "What is the cheapest / best value card dealing machine set up". If the club only has 5 or 6 tables then it might be appropriate for either bridgepal or Bridge+more table top dealing machine. Next you have to consider how many boards will be played and how many sessions happen each week. This will increase the cost for the number of boards and the number of sets of boards required. Similarly this will affect the number of packs of cards required.
Next consideration must be given as to how the machine (Bridge Sorter or Duplimate) will be used and where? Do the club have room for people to come in and dupliamate the hands, or will they do it at home and transfer the machine around. Will this require more sets of boards and packs of cards. Does the club have enough volunteers to do the preparation? Remember this is a big commitment and needs some understanding of what can go wrong and how to deal with those incidents. Note that most dealing machines don't like messy cards so if you have tea and cream cakes at half time that might reduce the lifetime of the packs of cards.
Probably the best place to go for information might be a selection of nearby clubs (or even your county association) to find out what they are doing or intend doing about preparation of boards for play. You might need to have help from another club should your machine go wrong and it needs to be sent away for repair! You might be able to share a machine set-up but use your own Boards and cards.
Hope this helps
We use Dealer4 which has the added advantage of not requiring bar-coded cards - it has a camera that views and identifies each card before dealing.
Dealing a set of 28 boards takes approximately 10 minutes for a team of 2, stripping the cards from old boards and feeding into the machine to deal again. We have had it for about 10 years or so and it is still going strong.
Thanks for the helpful replies - it looks like this is heading towards the 'too hard to do tray' not least because of the eye watering cost of these machines AND in the case of Duplimate, the cost of them in Sweden (where they are made) compared to the cost of them in the UK which is significantly more.