CASS - Software produced by, and available from, the English Bridge Union

Free to affiliated clubs from the EBU. Tel: 01296 317200

The EBU's decision to develop the Bridge Club Administration and Scoring System (CASS) arose because of the need to improve the administration of the Master Points scheme. This scheme is a very important source of income and recruitment but it is extremely difficult for the EBU to control the issuing of Master Points and to audit the income from them.

The program is designed for Master Points to be collated from events scored with it and then submitted electronically to the EBU, normally every three months. The EBU will validate these, confirm the submission and detail any problems. Master Point certificates will no longer be printed.

CASS comes with a long-winded 292-page manual on disc - about 291 pages more than comparable scoring programs. Luckily this can mostly be ignored as help screens are provided, which are much more useful.

My first experiences of CASS were not encouraging; I found it to be difficult to use and liable to crashing. Following advice from Harvey Fox at the EBU, I uninstalled and reinstalled the program and then downloaded the latest upgrade from the EBU website and it now seems to work well.

Membership Database

CASS can be set up for single or multiple club use. Comprehensive data about each member can be recorded in the club database but most fields are optional. For Master-point purposes every member must have at least an EBU number or a post code to enable verification.

Scoring

A new event is defined by specifying the number of tables and movement. An extensive database of most commonly used movements is supplied and there is provision to define other movements. There are various ways of selecting player names from the club database including the use of short codes. Visitors' names can be typed in.

Entering scores on travellers is very efficient, with a choice of key-stroke procedures. A list of travellers is shown at the bottom of the screen which indicates those not yet entered and any one can be selected by pointing and clicking.

When all travellers have been entered the results can then be displayed and/or printed. Results can include ranking lists, pair/board matrices (recap. sheets), travellers and personal score sheets. Unfortunately the user has very little control over the size and style of printing. Web pages can be created and results saved as text files for further processing. At present CASS cannot be used to score events with more that one section or session. Modifications to make it useable for such events are promised later this year.

Conclusions

CASS is similar in use to other Windows scoring programs and it is free to EBU affiliated clubs. It is rather less friendly on first use than some others and has limitations which the EBU promises will be overcome.

For clubs already happy with a scoring program there is no incentive to change unless they want to use the Master Point features. It seems inevitable that electronic submission of Master Points will come to be accepted, in which case other programs will need to incorporate this feature in order to compete. At present, however, the EBU is not enabling them to do so.

David Beever

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