[pescetom]

blackshoe, on 2024-August-28, 19:01, said:

If the price of the Bridge+/"Spinner" device were to come down by a factor of 100 or so it would IMO be a good choice. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Now that really was a great idea that came just too late.
Had it happened even five years earlier it could have quickly established a niche and then driven down costs (and stimulated clones) to become mainstream. For a club like ours was a few years ago, running less than ten tables and with no dealing machine or Bridgemates, it would have been a compelling choice even at say €600 per table.
But now with clubs folding and selling off Dealing machines, it's getting easier both to find cheap used models and to obtain interesting prices on new ones. And BM loses all its appeal when you already have the scoring on your phone.

[sanst]

Again we see differences between the different countries. There's a program for the BM's, Bridge-IT, that isn't available in other countries than Holland AFAIK. There's also an app, both Android and Ios, that can be used for entering scores and more. There is Bridgemate Play, which isn't available here. And bridgmate.it seems to belong to someone else.
A special version of Bridge-IT is used in the Dutch clubs, but that one doesn't support the app or Play. Since covid has been a disaster for the union, with redundancies and other cost cuts, the develpment of that program is much slowed down. Also the newest version doesn't support the use of an app for scoring.

[pescetom]

sanst, on 2024-August-30, 02:14, said:

Again we see differences between the different countries. There's a program for the BM's, Bridge-IT, that isn't available in other countries than Holland AFAIK. There's also an app, both Android and Ios, that can be used for entering scores and more. There is Bridgemate Play, which isn't available here. And bridgmate.it seems to belong to someone else.

Bridgemate.it is owned by the national distributor who historically produced the scoring program most used in clubs, until the RA started to impose its own program. The RA itself and all the largest clubs have BM, and it is fully (I would argue too fully) integrated into the scoring program solution. So those Directors who have BM are in a comfortable bubble and reluctant to allow people to use the app, even though the players love it and it allows things BM never could.

[pescetom]

blackshoe, on 2024-August-28, 19:01, said:

If the price of the Bridge+/"Spinner" device were to come down by a factor of 100 or so it would IMO be a good choice. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

If some diehard card fanatic wants to get rich at my expense, I did have an idea

Most of the hard cost of a Spinner like device must be in the internal dealing machine, which is a complex electromechanical component, expensive to source. The device also becomes bulky, increasing enclosure costs and making the device less practical on a small table.

How about replacing the central dealing mechanism with one (or four) cheap 2 tone label printer(s), using erasable black and red inks? Plus normal plastic playing cards, but with no design of rank and suit, just a white space top left. Now instead of sorting the cards physically into order, the device just leaves them in the order of play and for each card it erases the existing ink and prints the suit and rank for the next deal before ejecting it into the tray.

[jillybean]

pescetom, on 2024-August-30, 10:13, said:

If some diehard card fanatic wants to get rich at my expense, I did have an idea

Most of the hard cost of a Spinner like device must be in the internal dealing machine, which is a complex electromechanical component, expensive to source. The device also becomes bulky, increasing enclosure costs and making the device less practical on a small table.

How about replacing the central dealing mechanism with one (or four) cheap 2 tone label printer(s), using erasable black and red inks? Plus normal plastic playing cards, but with no design of rank and suit, just a white space top left. Now instead of sorting the cards physically into order, the device just leaves them in the order of play and for each card it erases the existing ink and prints the suit and rank for the next deal before ejecting it into the tray.

I admire your creativity.
I’m holding out for club games on tablets. We are stuck with grotty old cards until then.

[pescetom]

 jillybean, on 2024-August-30, 11:20, said:

I admire your creativity.
I’m holding out for club games on tablets. We are stuck with grotty old cards until then.

Thinking a bit further, my creative solution could even make cards less grotty for the virus sensible, as well as being even cheaper than I first thought...
Make it a hand held device that accepts and promptly regurgitates 13 cards.
At the start of a deal, each player uses it and passes it to LHO.
Little more than a barcode reader and a label printer, with input and output slots.
Now each player has his own deck of 13 blank (but barcoded) cards, to be carried from table to table (eliminating much health risk and also the need for a stationary board, with related peeking risk at start of round).
The software can sort out the rest (including reading lead and play, people at wrong table/seat, people who failed to redeal their hand, missing card, even revokes for those who love this kind of stuff).
Maybe it could even be a personal device, a sort of card-holder to be carried from table to table.

I prefer tablets, but at first sight this does make a heck of a lot more sense than a Dealer Machine and Bridgemates and stacks of boards, at a fraction of the cost and workload and offering more functionality too (automatic registration of lead and sequence of play, warning of movement errors, impossibility of fouled boards or incorrect number of cards).

[barmar]

The two clubs I go to most often use BridgeTab, an app for Android devices. https://www.bridgetab.com/

[jillybean]

barmar, on 2024-August-30, 15:29, said:

The two clubs I go to most often use BridgeTab, an app for Android devices. https://www.bridgetab.com/

Thank you, this looks very promising and certainly an option if we need to retire the Bridge Mates.