Here’s the lowdown on ABF Masterpoints at our club-hosted BBO sessions:
How to ensure you receive ABF masterpoints you earn
To receive ABF Masterpoints for one of our club hosted BBO tournaments you need to register (once-only) your BBO username with the ABF (this is additional to registering your BBO username with the Peninsula Bridge Club).
- Go to http://www.abfevents.com.au/forms/signup/ OR Click on the link "Get email updates" on the ABF Home Page,
Enter your ABF number, name, email address and BBO username - you can also sign up for other ABF services at the same time if you wish. - If you have already subscribed to the ABF newsletter or SMS results service before, you will get the message "Click here to update your profile". When you click, you will then receive an email allowing you to add/change your BBO username. (This apparent "doubling up" is for security purposes.)
Don’t be confused by the BBO reporting of BBO Points
BBO has its own points awarding system that supports the numbers you see next to BBO usernames. The BBO points that BBO shows in their results have nothing to do with ABF Masterpoints, though doing well in a session can earn both!
How ABF Masterpoints for our club-hosted BBO sessions are calculated
These are calculated by the ABF just after the end of each month based on the session information BBO sends the ABF about club-hosted sessions from the previous month. The “month” is a US based month so sessions played on the first day of the month Australian time will be often captured in the previous month’s batch.
This data and process provides no capacity to itemise ABF masterpoints by individual BBO session. They appear on your ABF Masterpoints statement by hosting club and month.
Note that this process for club-hosted BBO events does not involve our club Masterpoints Secretary at all.
What about BBO robots winning my masterpoints?
The use of BBO robots to fill-in when we would otherwise have a sit-out has been a significant advantage to our players and volunteer directors. Unfortunately sometimes these robots do well in the session and win BBO points and appear to win sought-after ABF masterpoints.
The actual calculation of masterpoints by the ABF does not award masterpoints to robot pairs. Before the ABF calculates masterpoints, any pair of Robots is demoted to last place, with any affected pairs moving up a place as applicable. - so a pair coming runners-up to a robot pair gets masterpointed as the winning pair.
How the session ABF Masterpoints displayed on our website are estimated
Separate to the actual calculation we had been using a third party tool that estimates the ABF masterpoints to be awarded for each session. This tool is used primarily to convert BBO results to a form that can be uploaded to our website and to Pianola and offers an ABF masterpoint estimate as a value added service.
These estimated masterpoints are being displayed in our website results but the Pianola results emails are not currently displaying them - this is being investigated.
This process for estimating masterpoints is not as clever in dealing with robot pairs and continues to show robot pairs as winning masterpoints that are actually won by the human pairs ranked beneath them. Please mentally shift all the masterpoints shown as awarded to a robot pair and below down a pair when viewing our Pianola or website results.
