[paulg]

I ran a Swiss Teams tournament for our virtual club with seven three-board rounds and 11 teams. I did not want a robot team to win, so I left the 12th team as a sitout.

• Length of rounds
  The rounds never finished early even when the only two teams still playing were the sitout team and their opponents. The team sitting out should not cause this delay.
• The sitout team sits in the middle of the field
  There were no reports of sitting out twice, so I suspect having the sitouts in the middle of the field helps this. However it did mean that the leading team sat out the final round.
• Spurious TD calls
  I received two TD calls from the sitting out team asking for a score adjustment at the end of each round. This shouldn't happen.

Otherwise it went better than I expected

Cheers

Paul

[pescetom]

paulg, on 2024-August-27, 14:21, said:

I ran a Swiss Teams tournament for our virtual club with seven three-board rounds and 11 teams. I did not want a robot team to win, so I left the 12th team as a sitout.

• Length of rounds
  The rounds never finished early even when the only two teams still playing were the sitout team and their opponents. The team sitting out should not cause this delay.
• The sitout team sits in the middle of the field
  There were no reports of sitting out twice, so I suspect having the sitouts in the middle of the field helps this. However it did mean that the leading team sat out the final round.
• Spurious TD calls
  I received two TD calls from the sitting out team asking for a score adjustment at the end of each round. This shouldn't happen.

Otherwise it went better than I expected

I find it hard to understand the problem of a robot team even if it were to win, which I sorely doubt if the humans are bidding a system it does not expect.
But I agree that a sitout should never cause a delay.

[paulg]

pescetom, on 2024-August-27, 15:48, said:

I find it hard to understand the problem of a robot team even if it were to win, which I sorely doubt if the humans are bidding a system it does not expect.
But I agree that a sitout should never cause a delay.

The robots have an average matchpoint score of 54% at the club and I believe that the EBU rates them around 57% on average. Traditionally our club members do not like playing against them, primarily because they defend without loss of memory.

We did have one robot pair playng last night, making up a team with real people, and their cross imps were +6 so they were not a factor. The robot's teammates did not have a good time and the team finished last.

So perhaps you are right!