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.