Pivot teams in EBUScore
I am directing a pivot teams event with 12 tables, the organisers would like to play 24 boards. All the pivot movements available in EBUScore allow 20 or 22 boards. Is there a way round it? Increasing the set to 3 boards and stopping after 8 rounds is not going to work, is it?
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That is a bit of a headache. Stopping after 8 rounds will almost certainly give you unfinished matches. Assuming the 11 round set gives segments of 4, 4 , and 3 rounds, playing 3 boards for the 3 round segment is the obvious way to get close to 25 boards. That does leave you with a whole extra board against some teams though.
I guess any team movement can be played as a pivot teams? Might need tweaking for uploading but I'd be surprised if that was so tricky.
12 tables is a really bad number for 24 boards, since with teams movements the usual tricks for sneaking an extra round in just aren't available. There is a movement (Patton?) we played once, I think with 10 teams, with basically paired Howells, so each round is one match. Everyone moves, and it's a bit complicated, and it does involve board sharing, which for 2 board rounds might be a real pain - I'd deal off an extra set if I was going to do this. But you would be able to play however many rounds you liked and then stop.
2-3 teams out of 11 not being played is hardly ideal, I guess pivot teams tend to be less serious events so maybe balance is less of an issue.
The mathematics dictate 3-board rounds (max 11 matches, so 2-board rounds is only 22 boards). If you want to play 24 boards then you play 8 other teams. You can do this by playing 8 rounds of an American whist movement, playing the round in an order where you play 4 complete matches, then pivot, and play another 4 complete matches.
For Mixed Pivot Teams at this year's summer festival, we had movements for a full pivot for 12 teams playing 27 boards, playing 3 3-board matches in each pivot. I imagine this needed two sets of boards. The Teams User Movement file can be dug out.
Thanks Robin. Could I have the file please? What exactly is involved in entering the movement into EBUScore? Do I have to enter the assignments for each round explicitly or can your file be integrated into the system?
The crucial thing for a pivot teams is that both pairs of a team must play the same boards at the same time. There are two main ways of doing this: the first involves two lines, with half the teams playing stationary at NS in one line while their EW pair are stationary as EW in the other line. The other half of the field move (both NS & EW) so that they play against the same team using the same boards as each other. You could do this for your event if you were satisfied with each team only playing 6 of the 11 other teams. For that reason you would be advised to seed the teams.
The other way of doing it is to have a "Patton Schedule" which is essentially like a Howell movement for one pair from each team, and a mirrored Howell movement for the other pair. So you could model this on 6 table 3/4 Howell with 8 rounds and get the outcome you are aiming for.
You need a movement which can be grouped into sub-sessions, so that each match is completed within a sub-session: two sub-sessions are needed for a partial pivot, three sub-sessions for a full pivot. The boards can remain live throughout the whole session. EBUScore teams is then run as a normal teams event with this movement.
For NGS (and bridgewebs, but not pianola) you need to enter the pivoting lineups. (I have not tried getting the players to correct their names each round on the bridgemates.) Instead the scorer needs to enter the lineup in "Seating Lineup".
You can review the lineups using "Print Lineups".
You can check the lineups are right in the final UMS (XML) file by looking for the BOARDS_PLAYED tag, the number of boards played will be 8 or 9 or 12 or something like that (depending on the movement), numbers like 3 or 24 will be wrong.
I have just tried this as a test run prior to running a club pivot teams.
I used moverment M135 for an odd number of tables.
At the 'scorebreak', i.e after the teams pivot, I did as suggested above. However the seating lineup was changed retrospectively for the entire event, not just for the rounds after the break.
It sounds like you did it for round 1 rather than for the round where the new lineups should come into effect.
It helps a lot if the director ensures that players always pivot in a regular manner. For example, North remains North and the rest pivot one step clockwise.
We only have two scorers at our club who are prepared to handle the upload of our monthly pivot teams sessions and, often, neither of us play in those sessions. We've instructed TDs to ensure that players move in the above systematic manner and we'll handle EBUScore and the upload. Without that, we upload without NGS data.
This is absolutely right. Ensure they all know before the start of play how they will be required to pivot, and don't allow them to deviate from that.
I can see this is best in a full pivot. However if there is only a single pivot it does mean all players need to arrange themselves correctly at the start. Is it easy to get players to do this correctly?
Yes, they still need to know how they should pivot and prepare for it at the start. Threatening them with getting their team-mate's NGS should focus their minds.
Max Bavin wrote a paper on this to play 24 boards for 6 - 13+ Table. The recommended movement is:
Two rounds of 3 boards are played with each of two different partners. The final phase is 4 rounds of 3 boards with the third partner, so teams will doubtless elect to keep their 'regular' line-up till the end.
Rounds 1-4 are exactly as per the 7 or 8 team movement i.e.
Round 1 : E/W up 1
Round 2 : E/W down 2, boards down 1.
Whilst the players score up, the T.D. redistributes the boards with the highest set on table 1 Boards 1-3 are therefore placed on table 2.
Round 3 : E/W UP 3 : boards played are as distributed by the T.D. above.
Round 4 : E/W down 6, boards down 3.
The players now score-up again. Rounds 5-8 are as follows:
Round 5 :E/W move up 4 tables from their team table. NIS pass the boards down 1 table.
Round 6 : E/W down 2, boards down 1.
Round 7 :E/W down 4, boards down 2 (i.e. E/W take the boards just played to their team-mates)
Round 8 : E/W down 2, boards down 1.
I can supply all the Bavin User Movements in EBUScore format (It isnt available in the standard library)