dave251164

I used to play 3 or 4 Daylongs each day, but now I mostly just play one - the MP1 one. I get my 'fix' from the Free Acol Daylong and the free MP/IMP one. I'm also unlikely to buy more BBO $$ when the ones that I have run out, as I don't like feeling like I'm being ripped off! If it's true that the owners of BBO are trying to increase the value of the site before selling it off, as claimed in another post about price increases, then the new owners may well increae the prices again to try to make a quick profit on their purchase!?

Daylongs going up from 42c to 59c?! A 40%+ rise at a time when many people are struggling financially?! That's GREED pure and simple and demonstrates a complete lack of compassion, understanding and common-sense! I could maybe understand a 10% increase due to inflationary pressures, but 40%+ no way! Players should give serious consideration to playing less Daylongs in protest, so that the income from them actually goes down and not up with the price increase!

I just played in an Instant MP and the robots were taking quite a few seconds for each bid and play. They did speed up briefly, then slowed again. There were only 8000+ people playing in there. On the bright side, I was forced to play much slower than I usually do and was 1st/15.

Thank you. I now have something to do tomorrow in between boxset episodes!

The 'Download this PDF To See All the Hand Together' link just takes me to Page Not Found. This has been the case since Friday. Does anyone have a link that works please? Thanks.

Yes, I checked back and there was a Black Friday Bonus in 2020, where if you paid $200 you got $60 free. I never saw the offer last year though as you say. I agree that a similar offer would be an excellent idea. Or maybe something like get $ free for every $ that you buy, as long as you spend $50+ say? With inflation and the price of eveything going up it would be welcomed by BBOers I'm sure!

The biggest rip-offs are the 8 board Instant MPs and Instant IMPS which went up to 45c ages ago. These should be brought down to 39c or even lower too!

I've played in two today - earlier on and later this evening. The table kept going slowly/jerkily then freezing and booting me - 5 times on one hand I think earlier? - it said something about GIB Failed Ask Error 2 this evening but I never noticed this afternoon. This totally ruins your concentration and leads to errors that hopefully I wouldn't otherwise have made. I left both tourneys in the end as it was frustrating and no fun at all. Please sort this out, as it's not worth wasting money to try to play in them! Thank you.

'Hello' by Lionel Richie would be appropriate. Or just the line 'Hello, is it me you're looking for?' maybe?

Maybe put it in your favourites? https://www.bridgebase.com/forums/

You need to average over 56% in your best 5 boards to qualify for the final. I was curious to see how 80%+ scores were being achieved - was it the usual ideas like opening 1 of your shortest minor and then leaping to 3nt, even if you have a 6/7 card spade suit? But no, this was something new again! The trick seems to be to play in the qualifiers that take place later in the day and have fewer tables, but still many boards in the deal pool to prevent cheating. Then your score is often only compared with ONE other player! So someone in a 64 table event got 80%+ with 7 x 100%, 4 x 50% and 1 x 75%, so his scores were got by comparison with only one other player, except on the 75% board where it was 2 others. This was not a freak scoring episode as another had nearly 80% with 8x100%, 3x50% and a 0%! Whereas entrants to the first BIC Qualifier of the day seemed to getting their acore by playing against many more opponents - like 16 or 17 for example. So an 80% score obtained largely against one person would be more beneficial to your average than a much harder to achieve 65% score against 16/17 others , which is highly unsatifactory indeed! So in trying to avoid players cheating by using a large deal pool, players can game (cheat?) the system instead. 12 tops against a single player in a later Qualifier, which is do-able and you have a 100% score to help your average along! This just cannot be right or fair! I wonder if this is just a badly designed tourney or whether it's just a money making exercise to get in lots of $3 entrance fees or maybe both?! A possible solution might be to count your best 5 lots of points won, instead of using percentages? As this would take into account the number of players playing each board.

Yes adjusting the size of the deal pools would be good, but perhaps reducing the cost from say 39c to 29c would improve the number of players entering the IMP ones?

I played in a Daylong IMP2 yesterday - 368 players started and 340 finished. These were the numbers playing each board 7,4,7,7,9,6,6,5. I thought being played only 6 or 7 times was bad, but only 4 or 5 times is absolutely ridiculous! How can you have a meaninful comparison? Is the software that assigns boards to players even working properly?! Is cheating really so endemic that so few players get to play each board? We've lost bingos and the speed tourneys are so slow as to be unplayable and now daylongs IMPs seem to be dying a death due to so few players. It really has been all down hill since Flash went. Why didn't BBO just buy the right to use Flash and have their own programmers keep a version updated for BBO, rather than waste their time and money on a version that is largely unfit for purpose?

I played in a Daylong IMPS with 358 people starting and 326 finishing, but very few people played 5 of the boards. The number of players for each of the 8 boards were - 7,8,17,15,10,7,7,8. The number of players playing some boards seems to have gone down even more recently, so odd scores skew the results more. I wonder if this is because fewer players are entering or more boards are being used to prevent cheating or maybe both? If it's because of cheating, then cheating must be a major problem with so many boards needing to be used and then so few players playing some boards? Maybe IMP Daylongs should be reduced from 39c to 29c to encourage greater numbers? Then, maybe a minimum of say 15 players could play each board for a better comparison.

Only if it's carrying Flash back for us!

Maybe sort out the more important stuff first - like stopping all the freezing during bidding and play and speeding up the play from a snail's pace, to something usable and enjoyable once again?

Just tried playing in another $Reward race with only about 10,000 people showing as online to see if there would be less issues with fewer people playing. Still had lots of freezes in the bidding and play - some very long. Logging out worked and got it going, but not for long! I was so fed up and so far behind already that I left yet again. If BBO tourneys can't even function properly without freezing and going slow when there are so few players using it, then it really is not fit for purpose.

Mycroft - So you had an advantage over the players not playing the faster version, and now you are back at parity. No, the old Flash version was there for anyone to use, so no-one had to be at a disadvantage, as they had a choice which version to play! If they'd tried the new version, they'd have quickly gone back to the Flash version!

I was just playing in a 25c race and it was so slow that I only managed to play 10 boards in 15mins in the new none Flash Version. In the Flash version I used to play 17-20 boards! To add insult to injury it froze TWICE during those 10 boards. The second time I was behind by 100 when it froze with only 3 cards left to cash for 1NT+1 for 120 - meaning that it cost me first place and the extra points! This was with only 20K+ players online, so I hate to think how bad it would have been with double that number! This really isn't good enough - we're paying our money for what has become a really sub-standard service that is frustrating and far from enjoyable! Please BBO - DO SOMETHING to improve the situation for us - more servers or whatever?! Thank you.

I agree with your an "exasperating slowness throughout" comment in 4 about the new none Flash version.

It's already here https://www.bridgebase.com/v3/ however it's incredibly slow, clunking, freezes and is pretty useless by comparison to the Flash version. Please see my other 2 posts on the subject.

Hawkwind: Regular freezes/blocks. I have never managed an HTML session of more than 30 minutes without this happening at least once. Resolution: close everything else and if that doesn't work log out and re log in. Speed. Everything on the HTML version appears to take longer than the Flash version. Playing a card for example on Flash version instantaneous reaction, on HTML version delay of up to a second? I couldn't agree more Hawkwind!

Just tried to play in a daylong in the new none Flash version and it took forever, with the cards being played so slowly that concentration was impossible, but much worse was to come! In a 25c race the GIB used to play immediately each time, but now thye're taking forever each time. They were pausing all the time for 20 or 30 seconds even with only 2 cards left. Then the Numbers showed up to bid but the Suits below them didn't and it wouldn't let me click on the numbers anyway. When it eventually let me open 4H the cards in my hand started to display oddly with gaps in various places in the middle and nothing I clicked worked, even to leave. Had to leave by clicking the X to get off the screen. I tried other sites and they loaded and worked fine, so my net is working alright. I really wish that I hadn't taken advanatge of the buy $$ and get some $$free offer before Xmas now, as I'm stuck with loads of $$ that I can no longer use to pleasantly play bridge, but just to raise my blood pressure by it's awfulness instead!

Now the Flash version has been blocked, I've been forced to try the new version. It is absolutely awful and really not fit for purpose! The layout is terrible, the cards stutter before playing when you click on them and in the $Reward Race I just tried, it just sat there in the middle of a hand and wouldn't play a card! Speed tourneys are impossible and there's no bingos either, not that the new version works well enough to play anything at speed even if they had been set up. You have to click, sometimes multiple times to see things that were just there on screen before - like who is in front and behind you in races and by how much. The new version is an apallingly bad replacement for what was a much better version and I would be surprised if the programmers had ever played bridge races to get it so wrong!

https://blog.bridgebase.com/2020/11/30/prime-bidders-challenge-hands/