Thanks to everyone who responded to our poll where the majority of people preferred sitting out to playing the robots.

We've decided to implement the solution used by the Colinton Castle club that Jill Connor brought to our attention.

We will use a robot pair to fill sitouts when there is an odd number of pairs. However the results of this robot pair will be DELETED and all boards will be rescored to create a new final ranking. This means that you can play against the robots and it will not matter how well or badly you do, or you can just not play the boards and sit out for the round.

This policy means that the BBO running results may be misleading and the result may change significantly when uploaded to Pianola. It will come into force on Tuesday, 6 September.

We will still use robots to replace players who lose connection for a significant amount of time and results against them will count. However the robots will no longer declare hands in these partnerships which will reduce their impact.

If you have any questions, contact Paul or Louis.