So .. how'd we go in the Babich?

Your Waikato-Bays committee, pictured below, mostly pulled its weight in various ways. Anna, playing with nephew Jacob was the star of the show coming in at 29th of 970 pairs with 64.4%, Brett and fellow GM Gary Foidl managed 56th with 62.3%, Michael playing with Joyce Catchpole at Cambridge (where Jan dealt/scored/directed) was 238th with 55.4%, Rona and husband John 439th with 51.2%, and Ray was quite likely off somewhere pulling lustily on the end of a kite string.

What many will not know is that Jan and Michael were heavily involved in the organisation and running of the scoring .. well .. they did it all in conjunction with Compass Scoring author Bob Fearn. Bob arose at 2am California time to support our two local lads via Skype in their endeavours to get the scores out promptly.

Results that used to take 5-7 days to come out in the many, many years before the 2014 event are now theoretically possible within two hours thanks to Bob's extension of X-Clubs scoring .. the concept of which, incidentally, first occurred to Michael some five years ago.

Getting the results out in two hours is a bit of a pipedream as it involves each one of the 57 clubs that produced a result (two crashed and burned) e-mailing those results in the correct usable form before they all go home to bed. Usually, by the time it is discovered that the team cannot process a result - and there would have been a dozen or so that didn't work first time - it's too late to chase people up by means other than e-mail. The first cut of 34 clubs was posted before midnight - just an hour after play finished.

However (and there's usually a "however") the server that hosts the results went down under the volume of the postings and the number of people keen to see how they'd done. Worse still - the owner of the server had gone to bed (10pm Aussie time - I ask you!) because he had to catch a plane to a wedding in Melbourne next morning. Although his server will alert him when it goes down, the owner prefers sleep to call-outs after bedtime. Thus it wasn't until 8am NZT that he discovered the server had crashed and that more and more people from the Northern hemisphere were trying to post and view results. He would reboot only to have it crash again soon after. In the end he asked the scorers to publish only a progress result for 53 clubs and try again for the full set on the Saturday evening. As it happened, the last club result didn't come in until Sunday midday: there were lots of people kept in suspense. Which is good. Suspense works with bridge.