What makes a 1-winner event?
I was recently asked for help in fixing a problem where the arrowswitch round in a skip Mitchell had to be removed because of lack of time. This left a 1 winner event with no comparison between NS and EW. Easy enough to fix, but it got me wondering...
There are arrowswitching guidelines, but how much comparison does there need to be to make it a 2 winner movement?
One board played in the wrong orientation doesn't seem enough, but what if a hesitation Mitchell with an arrow switch had the last round cancelled - is that still enough? Where does the boundary lie?
Incidentally I came across something I didn't know whilst investigating this. If a board has been played the wrong way round (NS hands played by EW) I have alway just corrected the pair numbers - indeed some scoring software has a special function to do this.
According to WB 8.87.1, you can't (shouldn't?) do this in a 2 winner movement.
Note it doesn't say you can't in the laws - but then the laws say nothing about 1- or 2- winner movements.
Comments
Arrow-switching
If a board is not arrow-switched when it should be, or is when it should not be, or if a player accidentally pulls out the cards from the wrong slot so that the board cannot be played in ‘correct’ orientation, then the board should be played in the ‘incorrect’ orientation, as long as the scoring can accommodate the result. However, the type of contest may make this impossible: for instance, teams of four or two-winner pairs.
This word "may" can often cause confusion in English. I think in this case it means "it may be that the type of contest makes it impossible" rather than "you may not do this in this type of contest".
It may be that some scoring programs prevent you from introducing a one-off arrow-switch, or it might be impossible if you have numbered both lines with numbers 1 to n. For teams events, you wouldn't normally be able to arrow-switch, but if it happened at one table before the other table had played the board, then you could do it at both tables.
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If it is looking with say 40 minutes to go that the movement won't be completed, a better idea is to skip the penultimate round, that way the arrowswitch round still happens.
In theory, if you're only arrow-switching one round, it doesn't matter which one (assuming that the movement is balanced). You can switch the last round you play even if it wasn't the scheduled last round but the movement was truncated, or could even switch the first round to get the switch out of the way.
Thee could (in the past?) be a problem with Bridgemates arrow switching round 1. Both players and the bridgemate system could be confused about who was NS/EW for the purposes of entering names at the start of the round.