Sports Scoring
-
The
concept of sports scoring across Internet was developed by ECats in
the first instance to cope with specific Bridge events
- In Bridge, people
in clubs world wide get together to play the same hands on the same
night; traditionally this was scored by the club locally, then the
score sheets sent to a centre point for re-keying and re-scoring across
the whole field. We felt this was a waste of time and energy, and
developed an on-line system to take the scores, by ftp, from the local
club and re-score across the field on the server, with the results
then being displayed immediately on the web site.
- Unsurprisingly,
this attracted a great deal of attention - instead of having to wait
for results - in some cases, several weeks, people could see how well
they had done within about 15 minutes of their scores being uploaded
from their local club.
- Because of the
nature of bridge scoring, the scores change constantly as more clubs
upload and this just adds to the excitement - and to the number of
hits on the web site of course, as individuals log on regularly to
see how they, and their friends, are getting on.
- Further
development of the Bridge Scoring Site came when the World
Wide Simultaneous Pairs ran on 2 & 3 June 2000 and the MSO
Charity World Wide Pairs take place on 22 & 23 August 2000. These
events will see the results as before, but there will be a great deal
of additional information available to participants.
- Past World Wide
events have gone into the Guinness Book of Records as the largest single
sporting event in the world, with some 100,000 participants.
- ECats with the fantastic support of bridge players all over the world runs an on-line scoring event for the BBC Children in Need appeal each year. In 5 years ECats has raised £228,403.57 for this charity.
- For information
about either of these events, please email anna@ecats.co.uk
- ECats is now
developing the on-line scoring further to cover other sports and is
contacting other Sports Federations to offer them the opportunity
of partnerships to utilise the technology.