'Robot Resentment' and 'Players without Standing'
We have been substituting Sitout Pairs with Robots for some weeks.
They are quick to put in place; never rude, never quit, always explain their bids, never play slowly.
However they also frequently win or come in the Top 3 which is causing some resentment.
I'm exploring options at the moment and wondered if I could make the Robots 'Players of No Standing' (WB 2.3.2):
"When the above conditions for a substitute are not met, the TD may make emergency substitutions when necessary to facilitate the smooth running of the event, subject to the substitution not being substantially detrimental to the other contestants. Any boards played by the pair are without standing"
Peter Bushby Suffolk
Comments
The problem with this is that you would then need to go through the boards and delete these ones. If you want to do something like this I would recommend making a recommendation that explicitly says the results do stand but the substitute pair will be removed from the ranking list.
As Gordon says, the boards involving the robot pair would need to be deleted, which is best done by uploading the results to EBUScore and ticking the robot pair as "missing" in the "Properties" tab, which I believe should remove all of their results automatically. If not, you would have to delete each board in turn. Even then, if you are uploading to Bridgewebs from EBUScore, you will lose out on the playback feature that newer versions of Bridgewebs now offer.
Depending on the precise reason for your players not liking the robot pair, you could instead choose to consider them as without standing purely for masterpoint purposes (2.10.4 in the handbook). I'm not aware of an easy way to recalculate the masterpoint awards though so you would need to edit the XML file directly. This is subtly different to case 1 in that scores against the robot pair do now count, but the robot's ultimate ranking does not.
In either of these first two cases, an explicit statement before the event or on your website would be needed. That said, they are both perfectly valid approaches if you and your members are willing. Note that these approaches both create a half table for masterpoint purposes which may well reduce the awards for some or all pairs (in the 2nd case scenario, marking the robots as without standing for masterpoints could increase the masterpoint awards for some pairs but may similarly have no effect or even lead to a reduction so it's a bit of a gamble!).
A final alternative (excluding human subs from BBO or a standby pair which it sounds like you've decided against) is to have a standby player. This would ideally be someone who is without a regular partner (or just lacking a partner for a given event) but willing to give it a go. They could then be substituted in with a robot partner if there is a sitout (and they would benefit from a free game of course). Hopefully (aside from the standby player's perspective of course!) this standby+robot pair would be less likely to finish at the top (or at least players will be less resentful if this standby+robot pair do well).
Unfortunately (for this purpose) not.
Hmm. I just tried this with a copy of an event I had uploaded into EBUScore (I needed to assign a weighted score).
It removed the 'missing pair ' from the ranking and left the other pairs' MP totals unaltered so I thought it looked OK.
It seemed to do what WB 2.3.2 went on to say: "(i.e. the scores count for the opponents but not for the substitute pair – see §2.4.9),"
WB 2.4.9 saying: "Any such stand-by contestant plays without standing and does not appear in the final ranking list.
Any results obtained by the opponents of a stand-by contestant or a contestant playing without standing will count in full."
I'm obviously being silly. What I am I missing?
Peter Bushby Suffolk
You're not missing anything, I just attributed the missing pair option to the wrong case. Ticking the robot pair as missing will follow case 2 as per my post above and not case 1. If you wanted to use the case 1 option then you would need to delete each score manually as Gordon said.
Thanks @495670
Peter Bushby Suffolk
Back in the days of face-to-face bridge some clubs had BBO robots playing in place of their sit-outs and this happened in some EBU events also. Players could be offered the options of sitting out and being given 50% on the boards, deciding in advance they wanted to take 50% and playing the robots for fun or playing the robots and having it count. I am not quite sure of he legality of this but this does seem an identical situation and this solution would be easy to implement.
@Paul_Gibbons Thanks...
That's an interesting option and would solve the problem of not losing out by playing the robots
It might still leave some disgruntled if the Robots won nonetheless though
I've laid the options out to both committees (we allied to another club to get critical mass) and we will see what they say. Hopefully they will survey the players before deciding.
Peter Bushby Suffolk
I have not looked at the other days but in the results for Thursday's (EBU) Simultaneous Pairs event, two pairs of Robots sit in the top five places. How do competitors feel about this?