[hrothgar]

Hi All

I was running a few numbers and thought that folks might find some of the results interesting. For a while, I've been interested in understanding how "large" BBO is relative to major Zonal authorities like the ACBL.

Uday was kind enough to note that BBO is running between 400,00 - 450,000 boards per week right now. (I'll assume 425K)

In comparison, the latest ACBL Nationals totaled slightly more than 13K tables of the course of 10 days. For the sake of simplicity I'm going to assume that

(A) Each table plays a total of 26 boards
( All 13,000 tables were spread evenly across 7 days

Both of these assumptions are fairly "conservative". There are ACBL events that total less than 26 boards. The Nationals last for 10 days, not 7.

Even so, BBO is currently averaging 60,714 boards per day
ACBL Nationals is averaging 48,286 boards per day

In short, an average day on BBO is already significantly larger than what is, probably, the largest event in the world.

For kicks and giggles, I decided to compare BBO to the ACBL as a whole...

ACBL table count for 2003

clubs 2,036,988
regional 160,300
sectional 156,353
STaC 91,346
NABC 35,489

If we look at the table count for Clubs

2,036,988/365 = 5581

Assume 23 boards per table (this is probably very aggressive) = 128,358 boards per day. BBO is still "only" 50% of the size of the sum of all the "Physical" clubs within North America.

If we consider all of the ACBL tables in North America, we're looking at roughly 156,305 tables per day. By this count, BBO is about 40% of the size of the ACBL.

[scoob]

first the acbl, then the world!

[pclayton]

Maybe its a trade secret, but I'd love to see a growth curve of BBO over the past few years. And yes, I still remember logging on when there were less than 5 tables in play.

[fred]

We do have such graphs and they are very pretty and
clearly illustrate a very strong positive trend for the past
several years (no surprise), but our current policy is to
not make these graphs available to the general public.

The original reason for this policy was that we did not
want to make it easy for our competition to know how
we are doing. Not sure if this reason is still valid. I will
discuss with Uday at some point.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com