mrdct

I've been watching some BBO vugraph on my iPhone easily enough by VNCing to a machine running the windows version of BBO; but it would be virtually impossible to actually play unless you are happy with 10 undos per hand.

How do you decide whether he "really should be claiming"? Who decides? While there are many situations in which the TD's (or AC's) judgement may override a player's judgement, I don't see how this is one of them That's the whole problem - any method of determining who is wasting time will require a high degree of subjectivity. Psuedo squeezes will have varying degrees of pointlessness and I guess the sort I'm talking about are where declarer really shouldn't have any remotely reasonable prospect of an extra trick and is clearly trying to consume the opponents' time credits.

BBO vugraph aside, the online coverage of the World Mind Sports Games has been pretty ordinary so far. I really don't understand why the organisers couldn't have tested the scoring system well before the actual event to ensure that it all worked properly. I also don't understand why the Day 3 Bulletin still isn't on the WBF website with less than 15 minutes before play starts on Day 3. I wonder if Go, Chess, Checkers and Xiangqi are having the same problems.

The problem with putting a monitor in one hour into the match is that it won't overcome a frequent form of gamesmanship that I have personally witnessed when vugraph operating at a World Championship where an experienced pair known to be quite capable of playing quickly played extremely slowly for the first half of the match which frustrated the hell out of their opponents. After a couple of director calls a time monitor was positioned at the table at which point the experienced pair looked like they were in a speedball. The "innocent" pair then tried to keep up to avoid the time penalty being assessed on them and predictably a lot of errors crept in resulting in a large win to the "guilty" pair. I think ultimately technology is the answer with some sort of timing mechanism at the table that can automatically determine when a bid is made and when a card is played, but designers of such a system will have a lot of challenges to ensure that the system isn't too obstrusive. To the extent to which vugraph operators enter bids and plays in real time (which usually isn't the case) BBO itself could probably be used to calculate who is taking all the time. Indeed, perhaps the bidding and play itself could be entered by the players at table with the bidding boxes, bridgemates, boards and cards replaced with four laptops. Of course no system will be immune to gamesmanship, for example how do you assess time penalties when declarer runs a long suit trying for a psuedo squeeze for an overtrick forcing his opponents to think long and hard about their discards when he really should be claiming?

Is anyone aware of any good blogs from people on the ground at the World Mind Sports Games in Beijing?

First let me apologise if I'm raising issues which have already been raised. Over the last two days I've had my first sustained go at playing with the Flash version of BBO as I've only had access to a Linux machine (it's a long story). A few things I don't like: - Fair enough to make some revenue from advertising; but I could do without ads that blink which are very distracting (actually giving me a headache). I know I can move my window over to one side to avoid it, but that kind of defeats the purpose of advertising and makes a bit of a mess of my browser for when I open another window. - When declaring, dummy's hand doesn't get rearranged with trumps on the left which is a tad disconcerting. Moreover, the cards aren't getting arranged in columns like the Windows version which is a much better representation of face-to-face bridge. - I have a huge personal preference for the bidding to be in the middle of the table (just like face-to-face bridge) and found it a strain keeping track of the auction with it tucked away in the corner. I generally use picture cards, so in that setting I suggest the easiest way to fix this would be for the opponents' cards to be rotated 90 degrees. - When viewing the main bridge club to find a table to watch or potentially play at, I really missed being able to only view tables, full or otherwise, that had one or more friends at it. - I missed not being able to right-click on someone's name to join their table. Sorry if I'm sounding like a whiner, but at this stage I certainly find the Windows version a lot easier to use and I can't wait until my new laptop arrives in a couple of days so I can install BBO on it! Dave.

I think GIB is part of the problem, with a lot of commentator appearing to be basing their assessment of what can, could or should make based on GIB without really analysing the single-dummy situation themselves. I know I've been guilty of that myself a few times when commentating. Vugraph operators have GIB disabled. Perhaps it would be a good idea to disable it for commentators also. Notwithstanding the foregoing, if there is a commentator that you don't like it's pretty easy to silence them by simply adding them to your enemies and then select "ignore chat from enemies". Conversely, if there is a commentator that you do like, give them some positive feedback - they will almost certainly appreciate it and feel more inclined to sign up for more sessions.

I acquired an iPhone 3G a few days ago. It's quite a cool unit, but does not support Flash. If you Google "iPhone flash" there are all sorts of rumours and opinions about a flash player being relesed for the iPhone in the near future, so hopefully that will be a reality soon In the interim, I spent a few hours today watching the Spingold on my iPhone while I was out and about by using a free VNC app available through iTunes called "Mocha VNC" where I simply had BBO running on one of my computers at home, VNC'd to it and rotated the iPhone to get a landscape view. I had the table and 3 or 4 lines of commentary visible, but the VNC controls obscured most of the commentary. On a normal PC I always use pictures of cards, but on the small screen a traditional hand diagram was much easier to read. I think it would be pretty hard to actually play bridge as the level of precision required to select bids and cards wouldn't lend itself very well to the smaller screen and undos would likely be excessive; but for vugraph its fine. I think one way or another BBO needs to have a version playable on small screens as this seem to be the way of the future.

I'm not sure if it's been suggested before, but how about "drag and drop" to play a card whereby you click on your card and then drag it to the table and then release it. It won't eliminate all "misclicks" but I expect that a lot will be noticed before the erroneous card is released and can be safely returned to hand. This action would also make the play a little bit more like f2f bridge where you need to pull cards out of your hand and place them on the table. This should only be an option and played should still be able to single-click a la the curretn method if they so elect. A common misclick that I make is on opening lead where BBO re-sorts my hand just as I'm about to click on my actual lead and makes me lead something else. Perhaps a confirmation box for opening lead only would be useful. It would also align well with f2f bridge where, in many jurisdictions, opening leads are required to be made face down and then not revealed until partner says OK.

I'm finding it hard to believe that any remotely serious bridge is played with hand-dealt boards in this day and age. I'm quite sure that I haven't played a manually dealt hand of bridge since the mid 90s; be that club duplicate, tournament or (obviously) online. I can't imagine a bridge club staying in business in Australia if they didn't provide hand records with makable-contract analysis at the end of each session.

In this context I think "down" takes a similar to meaning to, for example, a gymnast saying "I've got my routine down now". Accordingly, I would interpret the comment as meaning "I am comfortable playing transfers in this sort of sequence".

Why must we "obviously accept that"? Should we passively accept all irrational decisions made by bridge administrators or should we seek to lobby and persuade such individuals to change their point of view?

I've just read the following post on rgb: Has anyone got any info as to whether or not this has any substance to it?

You don't need to "reserve your rights", you just get your opponent to agree that there was a break in tempo. If your opponent denies that he tanked, then I guess you could call the director to get that point of fact sorted out. So in ACBL-land if you don't call the director at the time of the hesitation do you lose your right to claim damage if at the end of the hand it becomes evident that one of your opponents illegally took advantage of UI?

Perhaps the procedure is different in ACBL-land, but I don't really understand why you are calling the director at this point of the hand. In my part of the world one would ordinarily wait until the end of the auction and simply get acknowledgement that the hesitation occurred and then only call the director at the end of the hand if damage has indeed occurred. The only irregularity I can see at the time you called the director is the incorrect bidding box procedure, but until such time as damage arises I can't really see what you have to gain by calling the director. As it happens you almost shot yourself in the foot as in these situations you usually want your RHO to take advantage of the UI to get the double chance of a good score (i.e. if 3NT makes you can call the cops and if it goes down you can quietly accept your plus score).

It's a lot easier to just hold your hand under the table.

I think it is completely inappropriate to be posting youtube videos of a person being shot in the head in the Bridge Base Forums.

What difference could it possibly make in the income whether or not the host is seeded? It's not so much that the hosts are seeded, but that hosts automatically qualify for the tournament.

I'd be quite happy with that with a minor modification along the lines of, "a mechanism by which ID may have occured might have involved aliens placing species here ..."

It could be 'Intelligent Design' at work.

I think your theory is in much the same category as Genesis 1:1 and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Nobody can disprove your theory, but if your theory holds true one would expect to observe certain things, such as oceans and dry land. The fact that we can observe those things is evidence that supports your 'Planet Q' theory but it certainly doesn't prove it. The inter-steller siphon hose and the gigantic slurpy cup components of your theory would probably give rise to other expected observations that could be tested and when found to be not observable might provide some evidence to debunk your theory.

There is zero evidence supporting intelligent design - and that is its problem. ID does not contain a predictable model but instead relies on negative inference to reach a conclusion - the flagellum is too complex to be the work of random events, hence intelligent design was involved. Theories can be tested in number of ways. One method is ask yourself what observations you would expect to see if the theory held true and then go out and make those observations and compare those observations to what your theory predicts. In the case of 'Intelligent Design' if the theory were to hold true, the expectation would be that extremely complex organisms would exist. The fact that extremely complex organisms exist is not a proof of 'Intelligent Design' but it is evidence that is consistent with the 'Intelligent Design' theory. It is incorrect to say "there is zero evidence supporting intelligent design'.

I don't think I fully understand the last voting option: "keep it open and ban free speechLets leave it as it is because some people like the sound of thier own typing" Was that intended to be two separate options? I'd virtually never looked at anything at the Water Cooler prior to the "Shanghai Incident", but since coming down here I've found quite a few interesting discussions that have been fun to be a part of. I'd like the Water Cooler to stay, but people always need to be polite and the BBO Censorship Committee needs to retain its right as the owner of the forum to moderate things as they see appropriate (albeit with such practices being a fair discussion topic in this area of the forums).

Should all the links to www.ipetition.com be taken down too? As a site supported by Google Ads there can and will be direct links from time to time to sites either providing or in turn being sponsored by sites that provide adult-related products and services.

I also think Jonathan was spamming various threads in this forum with links to his petition but, Uday, you have also recently been posting links to your "Hoof and Mouth Disease" thread in several places and in your case without any comment or explanation which as an even more insidious form of spam as the user needs to follow the link to find out that it's spam - at least Jonathan was overt about it.