EBU online training course
Having qualified as a Club director, with results that seem to have turned out reasonably satisfactorily for myself and my club, I thought I'd take a look at the EBU C course (https://www.ebu.co.uk/documents/laws-and-ethics/td-training/test-paper-2017.pdf) with a view to maybe qualifying as a County director.
Most instructive. Couple of random thoughts:
The answer to Situation 25 quotes laws 6F2(a) and7E4(a) but doesn't actually say what the TD is expected to do about it - maybe this would be useful?
Situation 27: "Your club uses travellers. When you arrive home and start to do the scoring, you find, Board 18 (N/S vulnerable): N/S scored -100 for 2S-2".
Answer given is: "–100 is a valid score, so even though it says 2S-2, custom and practice says [sic] you go with the
numerical score".
?
Seems to me your first course should be to contact as many as possible of the players concerned to find out the actual result (-1=100 or -2=200), so as to get the correct score if possible. Surely most club directors will have access to quite a few of the club members' contact details. (And if you get to penalise them a couple of MPs for incorrect scoring, so much the better).
Comments
OK - I assume that in the first situation you would prefer the EBU just note that you award an artificial adjusted score if the OS get more than 40% - and you may award a procedural penalty - usually 25% for repeat offences after having been found out - or for players who might know their agreement is illegal. WB 2.8.2
The second situation is discussed in the White Book 8.9.1. And it agrees that reasonable efforts should be made to obtain the correct score - but that input is needed from both sides, especially as the correction period (8.9.21) might start at a very incovenient time. (At one club I play at the results are posted on the website sometime around midnight.). At a club the correction period should be set to be much longer than the EBUs default of 20 minutes (quite possibly a week) - but the problem is that incorrect details may be uploaded to the EBU - resulting in NGS rankings and master points being incorrectly attributed - at least at first.
You have to remember that there are going to be a lot of players anxiously waiting to find out how they have done during the session, and a delayed publication of the results is going to dissapoint them.
If you do find this problem and can't contact the players then maybe you could post a comment on the club's website (bridgewebs or whatever) saying the final results are subject to confirmation of a possible incorrect score.
(I currently have a situation where two scoring queries have arisen that require amendment. I have no access to the club computer until Tuesday, so I deleted the EBU Submission and left the (slightly incorrect) scores on the website. That, I felt, was being fair to everone.)
Not sure why you need to make assumptions as to my preferences - I just thought it would be helpful from the candidate's point of view, and user-friendly from the EBU's, if specific guidelines for the TD were given alongside the law-book citations.
The points in your last four paras are all perfectly valid and don't appear either to challenge or to uphold the point of my posting, namely that the solution proposed on the website is maybe a bit absolutist and ignores the practicalities of club TD management.
Oh I agree that the EBU should do its best for all its members and I agree with your points, whether they are corrected is of course not up to me. Having become a club TD, I hope you continue to hone your skills and become more confident in the more complex cases as well as learning about handling bridge movements other than the standard Mitchell/ Howells.
I hope so too.