PRE-DEALT DUPLIMATE BOARDS ON CLUB NIGHTS. A proposal from Charles. This proposal was discussed at the AGM and it was agreed that we would try it out on small scale by hiring SCBA boards on a couple of Club evenings to give everyone a chance to see what it is all about. Malcolm has agreed that he will look in the diary to find two consecutive Mondays when there are plenty of sets of boards to spare and let us know so that we can put them into our programme. Just to put this into perspective, there are machines (called Duplimate) that deal random boards, and print out a hand record onto a sheet of paper. When you receive the boards you also receive a pre-determined number of the hand record sheets. If we availed ourselves of this possibility each player would get a sheet at the end of the evening and partnerships could use these hand sheets as a help in fruitfully discussing the bidding and play, or in arguing till the cows came home, or in throwing it away and ignoring it! It will make no difference to the social players, but be potentially valuable to those of our members who want to develop their game. The point of it is that both partners have something useful if they want to use it. It will make little difference to the type of hands we get, since the computer can be set up so that they will be completely random and we get quite close to that now as we shuffle well anyway. Ideally, we would have our own machine and do it ourselves. It is extremely non-technical and takes no time at all to create hands, which are dealt using special cards into special boards. The printing can be done using a normal computer driven printer. Unfortunately the Duplimate machines cost about £2000 (and rising, as they are made abroad priced in Euros) so I am assuming it is beyond us to buy one. Or have we got a fairy godmother somewhere? HOWEVER If we wanted to we could get the hands done by Malcolm Carey who holds the county-owned machine and produces hands for Sims competitions and the like. It would be a logistical nightmare to do them weekly, but to do sets for, say, six weeks at a time would be fairly simple. If we returned the used boards to him once a month for re-dealing we would simply haul out a set from our stock each week. I envisage the contingent of our Club who also play at Ipswich delivering and collecting the boards from Malcolm. I have spoken to the EBU who hold stocks of boards and the cards (the cards are bar-coded for the machine). Six sets of 30 boards and enough cards (say, 15 dozen) would cost £304.38 for the boards and £294.90 for the cards (they are only slightly more expensive than the cards we normally buy). Carriage from EBU will cost about another £40. So the total capital outlay would be about £640. Gill could tell us what our capital balance is but I am sure we could find that sort of amount from accumulated ill-gotten gains. In addition we would need to pay for the dealing. At present Malcolm charges £8 per set including printing the hand sheets which show all the hands and the possible 'making' contracts. Assuming that we used up some of our accumulated balances and did not try to recoup the capital cost the additional weekly cost would be less than £10. We average about (?) 5 tables so table money could go up by about 50p to £1 to cover the extra expense. Even this would mean that we are still by far the cheapest Club in the county (world?). I think that while it would make no difference at all to the casual partnership this service would considerably enhance most players' enjoyment of playing at Fram BC. It would enable the more serious partnerships to discuss easily and perhaps fruitfully how their bidding system works, and how the hands could have been played. And it would reduce the likelihood of the dreaded post mortem at the table, since it could be carried out later, and privately! |