[Hanoi5]

Greetings. We're running a butler tournament in my country (Venezuela) and we started using the ACBL score program to score it. Afterwards we changed to an excel-program prepared by the Director. We have some problems deciding what to do in the following situations:

- A pair is finishing a match late. The Director decides not to let them play a couple of boards because they're playing too slowly and there's need for a change of round. Using the ACBLscore, the pair who wins the match would get on these Not Played (NP is what you 'score' them) boards the average of what they've won so far, while the losing pair also gets the negative average, i.e. the average of what they've lost in the played hands.
This doesn't seem fair, in my opinion, for a pair is winning and another losing when they should be both penalized. However, as this is the ACBLscore we're talking about, the question is whether these boards should fall under the category of NP (Not Played), in which case the pair winning the match gets to win more and the pair losing gets to lose more, OR they fall under another category (i.e. both pairs get AVE or AVE- or any other, which one then?).
The excel program, of course, gives zero points to both pairs in these hands, which is in a way a punishment (Neither pair is able to get more points in the boards either to win by a larger margin or to lose by a smaller one).

- On the same line, what happens when a board is mis-duplicated or cards mis-placed and many pairs play the wrong way? are all the results in the boards cancelled? And if a board is thus eliminated, or if it is eliminated by another reason, do all pairs get AVE (0 points) or are these boards scored as NP (and then all the players would get their own averages in the rest of the boards of the match as their score for the boards, some pairs losing and others winning because of nobody's fault) or scored any other way?

Thanks for your answers on these topics.

[awm]

There's a philosophical question here, and perhaps there's no "right" answer. Suppose you run a pairs game and a couple boards get canceled. What do you do about the canceled boards?

If you score them as "zero IMPs" this tends to hurt pairs which were doing well when the boards were skipped. After all, they generally win IMPs on most of their boards and have lost an opportunity to score points. On the other hand, you help pairs which were doing badly when the boards were skipped. Let me give an example:

Pair One wins 48 IMPs over 24 boards.
Pair Two wins 47 IMPs over 22 boards.
Pair Three loses 47 IMPs over 22 boards.
Pair Four loses 48 IMPs over 24 boards.

If you simply count the missed boards as zero, the pairs finish in this order. However, pair two would've needed to win only two imps on the two "missed" boards in order to finish first, which is less than their average per board. It's quite likely that if they'd been allowed to play these two boards against pair three (apparently a bad pair) they would've easily won the event. Of course, you can argue that this is their "penalty" for being too slow and missing the boards, but look at the case of pair three. They need to lose only two more IMPs in the "missed" boards in order to finish last. Playing against the (apparently strong) pair two would probably have dropped them down. But instead they have been granted a "bonus" for missing the boards!

Obviously one can argue about this endlessly, but the conclusion most people come to is that "if no one is at fault for missing the boards, neither side should be helped or harmed in an obvious way by the fact that the boards were not played." The general goal in playing IMPs is to maximize your average imps per board -- think about a game that has a sitout for some players and not others; it can become virtually impossible for the people who sat out to win the event simply because they have fewer opportunities to score up IMPs (especially in a big game, you need to be winning IMPs almost every board in order to win, and two or three enforced zero IMP boards will kill your score). So rankings in ACBLscore are by average IMPs (actually I think it multiplies things out to look like a total, but it may as well be average IMPs). If you actually want to penalize one side or the other you can assign AV+/AV-.