Shadow tables for anxious players
My club uses EBUScore Pairs and BridgeMates for its F2F (face to face) sessions.
We have some players whom we're trying to tempt back into the F2F world after they've been through our excellent starter course, played a bit of F2F bridge, but then found BBO, where they feel "safe". We're suggesting to some of them that we could make our F2F sessions inclusive without making them feel intimated by competing with other club member who regularly play F2F.
We'd like to put up a shadow table alongside one of our two regular F2F sessions so they get used to using BridgeMates as well as being in a room full of other pairs playing the same hands. However, we know they will need to be slower than the rest of the tables.
My thinking is to run two sessions with an identical set of boards each, but we've only ever run simple F2F sessions before.
So, two questions...
- Can we run concurrent sessions in EBUScore using the same boards but running at different speeds?
- Can we upload two separate sets of results (one for each session) to BridgeWebs and to the EBU? (I've merged sets of results in the past so I know how to combine these if, purely for information/interest, we would to show the shadow players how they fared against the players in the other section.)
Any observations, suggestions or advice would be very welcome.
Thanks in advance,
Chris Woodhouse, Bakewell Bridge Club
Comments
I think this video https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnposOXe7bg&t=10s should give you all information you need for 1 or 2 'shadow' tables. There should be one out shortly on how to have larger numbers.
I would suggest that you run it as 2 sections, but with your novices playing fewer boards.
Main room play 24 boards (say) and they learner table plays 18 (or whatever).
As a preference, I prefer not to run separate sessions for the learners as it simply reinforces their feeling that they are not good enough. I would rather that they play in the main event, but schedule that they play less boards - say your room plays 8x3 board rounds, give them 2 boards per round. If you are playing 4 board rounds, give them 3. Quite quickly they get up to speed and they can enjoy the social side of being in the club and included.
This does need your members being welcoming and accepting of the fact that these are the members of the future and are needed.
Thank you @Paul_Gibbons and @Martin