The "Rencontre Bouliste"

The Boules “Rencontre”
The planned boules get-together duly took place on Sunday and was generally acclaimed a great success. That was the main thing. There were 48 players and a dozen prizes, which Michèle had managed to extract from local businesses, to distribute. The top and bottom three scorers all got prizes and the rest were distributed through a random draw of the players. The event was officially called a “rencontre bouliste”, a boules get-together, to make it sound as intended less formal than a competition or tournament. At the end of the evening everyone seemed happy so the event will probably become an annual one.

Unfortunately I lost my rag somewhat when registration got underway. We had anticipated various small problems and decided on ways to circumvent them. I had been slightly worried, knowing the way of the world here, that people wouldn't turn up for registration until the event was due to start, at 4.00pm, and that the event would thus drag on into the evening. A game generally takes about 35-40 minutes but can last over an hour if the teams are well-matched; and each player was allocated three games. As it happened, people turned up early so there was no problem there. The idea had been to give each contestant a number and, with that, a slip of paper showing the number of their partners for first, second and third games, so that as soon as they had registered they could look for partners and opponents (who was against whom was on a sheet at the registration desk) and get the show on the road. What actually happened was that people were just given their number at registration so we had to go around afterwards finding people and giving them the appropriate slip. It didn't matter much but was messy and meant that we couldn't get started until over 40 people were registered. Anyway, the “rencontre” finished in good time.

Then we'd decided that as we wanted everyone to meet new people and that couples would quite probably come to registration together, we wouldn't give consecutive registrants consecutive numbers. Knowing this, when I drew up the fixtures I didn't worry about pairing numbers 1 and 2 or 7 and 8, for instance, as I assumed they wouldn't be couples. This seemed to be forgotten at registration so consecutive registrants did get consecutive numbers and consequently several couples played as such (although only for one of their three matches). We'd also noted that the total number of players had to be divisible by four and so, as organisers, we decided we wouldn't register ourselves until the total was known and would then add ourselves as necessary to make up the requisite total. This didn't happen either, resulting in two would-be contestants having to be turned away.

As I saw the decisions we had made being ignored I started to get angry; which was silly really as everyone else seemed to be happy to just muddle through. It was the more silly in that all my anger did was to make people concerned for me and why I wasn't having a great time like the rest of them.
A learning experience for me.........................

Another learning experience was drawing up the list of “fixtures”. The general idea was that each participant should play three matches, each time with a different partner and with as a wide a variation of opponents as possible. It turns out to be a simple matter to draw up the list of matches if, but only if, you know the total number of contestants in advance. Making people register in advance was likely to drive down the numbers playing and thus defeat one of the main objectives of the exercise. We had no idea what the eventual total would be; estimates varied between a conservative 30 and an optimistic 60. Not knowing the total in advance makes the problem absurdly complicated and involves an optimisation. If you plan for a higher total than you actually get the whole plan falls over and is irrecoverable. So you have to plan conservatively. We could have planned for 36, for instance, which would have given a wide variation in partners, but then would have needed an extra plan for a possible additional 4 or 8 players; and the variation possible within 4 or 8 is very limited. We opted to plan for successive groups of 12, with additional plans for 4 or 8 if necessary. Within a group of 12 the variation possible is obviously much more limited than that within a group of 36 but nonetheless greater than that possible within a group of 8. Participants did say that they would have liked more variation but it is not obvious to me how we can achieve that. So be it.