I have had a few  suggestions offered, one being that we limit the tourneys to 5 hands, which I am totally against doing for any number of reasons, and the second being that we open the tourneys to non members and invite them all to join the club.

It may seem as though I am being uncooperative but we DID open the tourneys for about 3 months when the numbers dropped so unexpectedly and suddenly. and we DID get several requests for membership, which were accepted. What these people want, though, is the sort of membership I have with a public club running tourneys,  something to do when nothing else is available, and in which I participate maybe 4 or 5 times a year. This is not helpful, and really, what it the point of being a private club and running open tourneys? I also got some complaints about it at the time from members, because when running an open tourney there is often going to be the odd abusive player showing up and those people upset everyone else at the table, not just the victim, even when they are immediately booted.  There is also the issue of trying to cope with multiple runners, even with the completion rate set very high, since most tourneys were run with a single director. Finding 5 subs at a time is NOT fun.

The hosted tables I think might be worth pursuing again but unsure if going into the summer is the right time to try this. If people want to give it a go, we can certainly try it again. 

One suggestion was that anyone who didn't have at least one MP or isn't known to participate somehow be dropped from the membership.  This is appealing but the problem I can't see a solution for is the tracking of people playing in the club. We can certainly track people who attend teaching sessions or play in tourneys or team matches,  but what about those who just play? We are absolutely NOT dropping the people who play in the club but don't attend teaching sessions etc.  and how do we know who they are unless we are there at the time?

But if we could limit the membership to people who ARE involved somehow, then we could serve those people better with a whole lot less frustration all around.  I would rather have a club of 100 members who are involved than 3000 members who aren't.  THEN we could focus on only adding members who are sponsored by active members, and we could also have an interim membership requiring a minimum amount of participation for some period of time.   I tried this about 2 years ago with little success, unfortunately often the applicant would fulfill the obligations for the month and then disappear. And it took a whole lot of time to monitor.

Part of the problem was because at the time we had some very weak players who lurked in the club and pounced when the new member opened a table, so it was often pretty sad bridge, understandably not appealing to a strong advanced player.

I am getting a lot of people saying they are still getting an error message and are unable to register,  I'm not sure what you mean signing in manually? How do I tell new members to do that?

Thanks for your post! You and Joy have been faithful supporters since the beginning, and your involvement has been very much appreciated. We might try another evening tourney midweek, but even Dulci's tourney on Sunday evening is struggling, as is the one on Saturday morning.  Both of those were doing well until a few months ago when participation started to drop off, for no obvious reason.

The business of getting tables going in the club is something I wonder if best left until the fall now? Summer is short and people tend to be out and about or so it seems, having hosted tables might well be worth another try, but the question is when.

One thing I should make clear is that we don't expect members to be involved with everything we do..it would be nice but isn't realistic, but if even 90% of the members were involved  even just once a week with SOMETHING... playing in the club or a tourney or going to a class, we would have a phenomenally successful club.  Perhaps we should implement something like that, as a requirement for continuing membership, with allowances made for people who are moving or ill or on holidays or whatever and negotiate that with us.

I asked members to come here and tell us WHY they want the club, where are they?

About 4 years ago(? a while anyway) I got an expert  to come in once a week to be a resource for people who were playing in IAC at a designated time,  someone who would be available to discuss/clarify questions as they came up. Nobody ever asked!!!  even when it was clear there was confusion, they wouldn't call him over and say they were confused as to what to do or what the bid meant or what their lead should be, nothing! Even when gently  and privately the suggestion was made in case they had forgotten why he was there ( or even that he WAS there) people wouldn't ask him for help.

  When the guest got tired of wandering around the tables without anything to do he started to initiate  interaction and offered some input.  Unfortunately fairly soon after he started doing this,  he chose to use as a discussion point a bid which the bidder was not only totally content with, but willing to do battle with anyone  who might suggest there might have been a better one for whatever reason. It was an awful situation and although the expert, who is a top player in his country, was philosophical about it I was appalled. In any case, if nobody was willing to  engage around issues then there was really little point in asking him to give of his time. So that stopped after about a month.

This lack of engagement is what makes me reluctant to look for more teachers. We have a minimal number of people show up, given we are back up to around 900 members again. It's like drawing teeth, usually, to get anyone to sit at the table.  This has been true for a very long time,  it was even true for both Shep and Hondo, and more supportive, gentle teachers it is hard to imagine.  Members have been suspended from the club for interfering with or making public  derogatory remarks to or about the players at the  table in a teaching session and that hasn't been an issue in any of the teaching sessions I've been at for a very very long time.   So it's got nothing to do with fear of abuse if they get something wrong. So why won't people sit at a teaching table?

 Grant said a number of months ago he could get another expert and we could set up a table with people playing with him and his guest. with private commentary to the kibs about what they were doing and why.    I'd love to do that but  haven't pursued it because I've lost faith that anyone but me would sit ( and I feel I should be in the back of the line). It's unfair and insulting that these people offer their time and then have to twiddle their thumbs because people want to be coaxed into playing.

We have tried tourneys in the middle of the night.  We  tried running  evening tourneys 3 times a week  for several months, none of the people who asked for evening tourneys ever played in any of them, although not infrequently  they were playing robot tourneys or even in other BBO tourneys when the IAC tourneys were on.  Brenda tried running tourneys at 4 am Eastern  so the Australian etc contingent could play, we only got a scant handful of people, not enough to run a tourney, and who in any case often already  played in the other tourneys we were offering. The other day when Sanya cancelled her tourney for lack of registrations there were at least 50-60 members logged into BBO. 

Aside from that  people USED to show up for these!  Dulci was getting between 16 and 20 tables, I was getting 12+ on Monday and Saturday.  Now we are relieved to get half that number. Why? there are ALWAYS IAC members online elsewhere in BBO.  Many members are highly particular about  who they play with and will refuse invitations, which is offputting for players, I don't know what if anything can be done about that.  Perhaps they aren't playing  because they are bored with meeting the same players every time, the regulars whose support make trying to offer events and so forth worthwhile?

Some  don't like having to wait for the clocked tourneys, but unclocked are  difficult with small tourneys and end up with players  playing the same opps again...and then sometimes having to wait even longer tor a slower pair to catch up;  so until and unless the numbers pick up that just isn't practical.  So some have left because the tourneys are too slow and others because they felt pressured  to finish the hands on time. To solve the issue we need more players, so it's like a dog chasing its tail.

Opening the tourney to the general public is problematic for the director it offers any more players, to be sure, but many of those are rude or runners or both. It's not fun looking for 5 or ten subs every time the round changes, if you can even find that many subs willing to play. 

 I personally think 5 board tourneys, which someone has twice  suggested, are a bizarre idea and not worth my time so I'm not interested in asking anyone else to give up their time to do it either. People have asked for Speedballs, so we tried those,  one a week for a while: after the first couple apparently the novelty wore off and people stopped coming out for them either, including the people who had asked for them.

Some have told me they are super busy at the moment, fair enough. Some have said they can't negotiate the new BBO, I tell them how AND refer them to Sanya's excellent notes. Sometimes we see them occasionally after that. Mostly they want to make sure they are still members but we never see them in the club or in any club events.

WHY do they want to belong to the club? How did some of them come to even notice that BBO had dropped them out of the club and why did they care?  It's a total mystery.