Farewell Messages

Good, Better ...

This is my 5th world championship of this kind, starting in Geneva 1990. That was my best up till now. We build our own offices as we did here and had different colors of carpet showing the way to the rooms even more sophisticated than here. Further comparison brings the advantage to Verona. Technically we have made huge progress. In Geneva we were proud to offer the duplicated boards for both pairs finals prepared on continuously protesting duplimates and still had the wives of executive committee members doing some duplication manually. Here we used duplicated boards everywhere, the staff producing almost 52.000 boards without any serious problem. They were fantastic.

ut the real jump was made by the use of the Bridge Mate producing real-time results, making it possible to have almost-session results for each pair before that session had ended, immediately showing the estimated percentage on the boards played and offering a fantastic show in the vu graph theatre during the final Open Pairs when all results on a board became available watching the play of that same board on the screens. What more to wish?

The secret of the success of this event has many more elements. We have a very experienced staff nowadays, knowing exactly what has to be done. This is true in every field, the TDs are (semi) professionals, the scoring staff is superb with various qualities you only can dream of. The movement for the seniors with some drop outs and demanding everybody to meet almost everybody became impossible to arrange but they found a solution. Grazie mille, gentlemen.

Moving the boards to the playing area, setting up the playing rooms, handling the forms, dealing with line-ups, producing the huge daily stream of information on post boards and playing tables, all done with me giving hardly any instruction. They all know their jobs better than I do.

There is one issue still to be improved: the registration of players. Not the software we are using, that works fine. But you, the players. We don't have a clue about the participation in the various events before starting time. The evening before the start of the seniors pairs 76 had paid, but 122 were (pre)registered. At starting time it appeared we had 103. Just an example, it happened all the time. This makes it impossible to organize such an event properly. I consider it a miracle that we managed to start only 20 minutes late in most cases, thanks to the perfect but stressful job done by the TDs.

I would like to improve this aspect, but it is not easy. We put a lot of effort in balancing the groups concerning strength, country etc, which becomes almost useless when in the end 15% don't show up. We need a little bit more discipline there. But on the other hand without knowing it you behaved incredibly well. Starting the open pairs, after filling the holes you left, we played with exactly 11 full sections of 14 tables, 336 pairs. Impossible to organize, it just happened. And almost the same perfection appeared in the Women’s Pairs. So you gave me also comfort.

I had my usual couple of sleepless nights but that is my own fault, not daring to believe that things will turn OK at the end. Being at the end now and daring to say that things went OK seems an understatement regarding the real quality of Verona 2006. Let me put that assessment in your, the players, hands.

Ton Kooijman

Grazie Mille!

As always, the championship has flown by. It seems only yesterday I arrived in Verona, wondering what country my luggage was visiting.

Ron Tacchi's photos have been especially good at this tournament. Harvey Fox is not an official part of the Daily Bulletin staff, but he has helped immeasurably in a number of ways. Thanks also to Akis Kanaris, our layout editor, and Fotis Skoularikis, who made sure the Daily Bulletins were posted on the Internet.

As always, our co-ordinator, Jean-Paul Meyer, has been there each day to lend support and guidance.

Ciao!

Brent Manley, Editor