kladenak

Not exactly replying to your question, but Richard Pavlicek has a nice file checker and converter of various bridge notation formats, LIN included: http://www.rpbridge.net/cgi-bin/rpfc.pl

I play the same system as you and I like it. Recently I bought Eric Rodwell's Bidding Topics Book 2 in which he handles the 2C opening (and he actually proposes this system). I will paraphrase just two of his comments which are in line with what others have said: 1) Responding positively 3C or 3D should be confined to one-suited hands, solid suit, 6+ cards, as it is so much preemptive. 2) Another point I found interesting, perhaps not 100% related, is that a positive response should only be made on hands where it is possible to visualize playing in slam if opener has a good fit: having two honours of the top three may not be enough. In other words, there should be some shape as well. And one should think twice even fulfilling this criterion if responder's suit is spades as again it drives the opener with hearts to level 3.

I would find it useful if it were possible to bookmark (BBO internally) certain frequently visited areas of BBO - e.g. a specific club. As it is, one has to click through several pages. Ideally a bookmark bar at the top so that it is not necessary to open a bookmark menu, there is plenty of screen estate and there would not be many bookmarks I guess. Even the current top bar would do, there is space.

Have a look at this link, I hope you will choose something... https://www.blakjak.org/two_suit.htm

I truly admire people with a crystal ball who know what I was using at the time of the problem. I did use the HTML5 version. If somebody with the same problem comes across this, I got today the following tip from the helpdesk: "Please use the https:// connection, voice does not work over http. https://www.bridgebase.com/v3/ " The BBO site apparently does not redirect automatically to https. I have not had opportunity to test this, have to wait for some teaching lesson or Vugraph.

I have the same issue as Ken, there is no "Voice" button visible. This was during the Bermuda Bowl when I knew that there was a voice commentary and also recently on a teaching table. BBO guys: any suggestion on troubleshooting? Win10 on a desktop, tested Firefox, Chrome and Vivaldi browsers, did not work in either. Thanks.

It happens to me as well, always in Firefox, not in Chrome. I found out that it is enough to switch to another tab in the browser and then come back to BBO for the chat to work again. No idea about the cause.

I would recommend two books by Ron Klinger: Guide to better Acol bridge and Guide to better duplicate bridge. They both have lots of very good material.

Hi all, thx a lot for your comments. When I posted my question, I did not expect so much good response. Perhaps we are all asking too much from BBO. In most pick up games the CC cannot be really used, even at a very basic level some sequences differ person to person. On the other hand, with regular partners we could perhaps do what we do in the physical game - just show the alert card. What makes it impractical in BBO is that you have to type the explanation. So I would propose the following: 1) When you are making a bid, you have the option to put a tick in an alert check box (just a tick, not the explanation like today). 2) The bid appears in yellow and if nobody asks, that's it. 3) If an opponent asks, you type the explanation in the popup window, like today. 4) And, HERE COMES THE PROPOSAL, the application remembers your explanations given on a certain bid and offers them next time someone asks about the same bid in a drop-down box. I would not bother about bid sequences, the "intelligence" would be delivered by the player, so all stored meanings for a bid would be offered, irrespective of previous bids. I think that after a short time everybody would build a small library of explanations - there would not be too many for any single bid IMHO - perhaps 3 or 4, so picking from the list would not be difficult and also the amount of data to be stored for each account would not be big. It would be obviously good to have access to this library through "My BBO" in order to edit it - correct mistakes, standardise explanations given on similar bids and perhaps prepare the explanations in advance. I guess this could be a fairly simple change from the programming point of view.

Does anybody know what is the intended BBO direction re FD CCs? I am using the Web client which seems to be the intended way forward of BBO. However my partner uses the old Win application and so we are wondering what is the best way of creating our CC. I downloaded the FD editor and I am happy to spend the necessary time with it, but I would like to avoid the effort should BBO want to move to the simplified CCs available in the web app. Any ideas / experience / recommendations?