Bridgemates: The Benefits
Identifying what benefits a Bridgemate system would bring to the club.
A Checklist
Not all possible benefits will apply to every Bridgemate user. For example, if your club invariably plays a simple 2-winner Mitchell movement, the ability of the Bridgemate to help players deal with a more complicated movement schedule is probably of little interest. Presented below are some of the major benefits associated with running Bridgemate-equipped events.
Feature |
Significance |
| Accurate scoring | When Bridgemates were first introduced [pre-wireless], the objective was to eradicate the inaccuracies of manual scoring. Many of us would be surprised to learn just how many errors a manually-scored event can contain. |
| Rapid scoring | Probably the feature that most players associate with wireless scoring - the fact that the result of an event is available within a minute or so of the last table finishing. |
| Informing the players | When we're using paper travellers, we scan the other results to get an idea of how well we've done. With Bridgemates, both NS and EW are shown their percentages on the board, based on the results so far available. |
| More information for the players | Depending on the options chosen by a club, the information available may include the opening lead, for example. Not to everyone's taste but, for many, a vital ingredient when it comes to analysing why partner's performed so badly. |
| Timely web-site updating | Not only do players see how they've done as soon as the event finishes, the fact that the detailed results are usually uploaded to the club web-site within a few minutes of the event finishing means that players can pore over the details over a glass of something when they get home. |
| Preventing mistakes | From time to time, we'll all do something wrong, and many features of the Bridgemate help prevent mistakes from occurring, whether it's playing the wrong board, playing at the wrong table, getting the score wrong, whatever. |