mrdct

I agree that the BBO coverage has been first class with a nice stable internet connection and very accurate operators. The bridge has been pretty good to watch also. The broader coverage, however, has not improved. No hand records, no convention cards, no timely scores (particularly in early rounds) and no detailed scores from any matches other than the broadcast match. Well done to the ACBL for getting the BBO coverage right, but they still have a long way to go to get anywhere near world's best practice for online coverage of a bridge event.

I heavily depend on being able to save complete LINs of BBO teams matches that I kibitz, but that functionality seems to have stopped working or is working sporadically.

Personally I'd like to see Tuszynski v. Feldman. Both teams appear to be in fine form having knocked off several higher seeded teams and there will be plenty of opportunity to watch the "usual suspects" in the next three rounds.

Looks like there were some really exciting matches. Fred's team (Rubin) got through by just 6 imps. Hopefully now that the rest of the event is on vugraph and there are only 8 matches to report on, vugraph operators can keep the fans informed as to progress scores in all 8 matches even if only one match is being broadcast.

I think reducing the number of Zones is a splendid idea. As Peter Gill noted, there are several countries in the world (including Australia) that seem to have an unreasonably easy path to the Bermuda Bowl. There are 8 Zones at the moment (registered players in brackets): 1 Europe (394,542) - 7 spots 2 North America (158,027) - 3 spots 3 South America (3,860) - 2 spots 4 Middle East Asia (8,818) - 2 spots 5 Central American & Caribbean (1,803) - 1 spot 6 Pacific Asia (52,667) - 3 spots 7 South Pacific (47,856) - 2 spots 8 Africa (7,346) - 1 spot I think you could easily condense this to four zones (my suggested allocations): 1. Europe - 8 spots 2. Americas - 5 spots 3. Africa, Mid-East & Central Asia - 2 spots 4. Pacific Asia and South Pacific - 5 spots Each Zone should be required to convene a Zonal Championship in Bermuda Bowl years to which individual countries can send one team, with the exception of any NBOs that have more than 100,000 financial members who can send two teams (at the moment this would be France and USA but will presumably include China also once they get their act together with player registration). The Top n places in the respective Zonal Championships should determine Bermuda Bowl spots. Addressing the original topic of Canada's qualification path, if we were to assume a continuation of USA's dominance in North America, the task will be to finish 3rd, 4th or 5th which will require them to be competitive with the best couple of teams from Latin America. Sounds like a reasonable hurdle to me. Similarly, if Australia can't make the top 5 in the PABF Championship (in which they already compete by invitation but non-contending for BB qualification) they don't deserve to be in the Bermuda Bowl.

The ACBL site, as per usual, has no running results of round-of-32 matches which must be approaching completion as I write this. If there are any BBO'ers at the venue, could you post some results (half-time and/or full-time) here?

Fact sheet from the official hotel website: http://marriott.com/hotels/fact-sheet/trav...d-suites-hotel/ Scroll down to the bottom of the page where hotel features include: High-speed Internet access Locations Connectivity Public Areas Wired Wireless Guest Rooms Wired Meeting Rooms Wired I just rang the front desk at the hotel and they advised me that the wireless internet in the public areas is FREE. That's right FREE. Wired internet access in guess rooms (where I believe the finals are played) costs $12.95 per day. It hilarious that it's taken a 25 post thread over 4 days to get to the facts that can be ascertained with one 3 cent phone call to the USA on skype! The incredibly high cost of internet access at the venue should no longer form part of this debate.

Take a revoke situation where partner has ruffed a particular suit at some point of the play and then when declarer eventually claims one-down and faces his hand it is clear that there were only 12 cards in that suit. Partner shuffles his cards and puts them back in the board and your opponents are none-the-wiser that they have gone down as a result of a revoke - but you know exactly what's happened. In my view you have a clear ethical and legal obligation to draw attention to the apparent revoke. Ethics aside, refer Law 72.A.2. Scoring of Tricks Won A player must not knowingly accept either the score for a trick that his side did not win or the concession of a trick that his opponents could not lose. I would interpret this as covering the above situation such that my opponent has made claim for an incorrect number of tricks given that he is entitled to a two trick penalty. It is against the proprieties of the game to knowingly get away with it. If it had been me who revoked and then when declarer claimed, I breathed a sigh of relief that no-one noticed, shuffled my cards and put them away - that would be clear cut cheating. As for waiving of penalties, refer Law 72.A.3 Waiving of Penalties In duplicate tournaments a player may not, on his own initiative, waive a penalty for an opponent's infraction, even if he feels that he has not been damaged (but he may ask the Director to do so - see Law 81C8).

100 % accurate. I would tell them I revoke and somewhat similarly I let them take back penalty cards or whatever, but I would never criticize anyone who did not do these things. I'll criticise you for making up your own rules and perverting the results in your field. If the laws of bridge intended penalty cards to be optional, they would've said so.

My point is who needs the archived commentary anyway? It doesn't work and even if it did work it makes it much harder to review a lin file as you need to click through each line of commentary. Surely, auto-archiving vugraph in the same way it auto-saves to your 'hands' directory is achievable given that the fuctionality already exists. For those who do want to wade through saved commentary, I guess BBO could do both.

As we all know, the automatically saved vugraph archives include commentary that rarely, if ever, coincides with the actual play when more than one table is broadcast simultaneously. If you can't catch a vugraph match live, it makes it quite painful to watch it later with commentary that doesn't relate to what you are watching. It would be much better if the vugraph archives simply recorded the actual bridge.

A possible solution to the problem of making a wrong lead after the cards get resorted with trumps on the left would be for the opening lead to be made "face down" as it is in face to face bridge in many jurisdictions. Basically, when you make the opening lead the card moves out in front of you into a played position, but to the other three players only the back of the card is visible until you click on it to reveal it. Until such time as you click on your lead card to reveal it, you can undo it without reference to your opponents.

I tired that. Cards are still in English, both when lookkng at playing cards and when looking at hand diagrams.

The Ace, King, Queen and Jack should be denoted "1", "R", "D" & "V" as per a French pack of cards.

I also noticed this last week (I think on Wednesday). It looked to me like it had been completely purged with less than 24 hours of results available when I was trying to look something up. It caused me a few problems and would hope that in future when purges occur, at least two weeks of results be retained.

You can never alert carding during play, but you are obliged to obliged to pre-alert your opponents of any unusual carding methods that they wouldn't be expected to know at the start of a match or round.

The alertability of a call has little to do with whether or not the agreed meaning differs from a default standard set. It's more about ensuring that your opponents are privy to the same information about your hand that your partner is. Different sponsoring organisation can regulate alert procedures. Such alert regulations are generally devised to strike a balance between proper disclosure, minimisation of unauthorised information and orderly flow of the game. They also tend to be written with face-to-face bridge without screens in mind. In a lot of places, bids of opponents' suits, doubles and bids above the level of 3NT are not alertable - most probably because alerting is more likely to help the side doing the alerting. In most jurisdictions, when screens are in use the alert regualtions are thrown out the window and many calls which would be excluded by alerting regulations become alertable. As BBO is very much analagous to playing with screens, my view is that all calls that have a meaning that the opponents may not know should be alerted. In my view this includes Stayman (which is alertable in face-to-face bridge in many places including Australia), transfers, acceptance of transfers, non-forcing changes of suits and NT bids with potentially unexpected ranges. In a self-alerting environment I don't think there is such a thing as "over-alerting". As for alerting card play, there are limited circumstances where card play is alertable. A specific example would be if you have an agreed with your partner to lead low from doubleton. Such an agreement must be made known to your opponents before the start of play.

That's the whole idea. You aren't meant to see your partner's alerts. By not seeing your partner's alerts, you avoid a lot of potential unauthorised information situations.

If the lead was being delayed until the question was answered, then one would presume that east was the one asking. Silly east could've avoided passing UI and still satisfied his curiosity about the 2♦ bid by asking south in private chat. Perhaps the way alerts and explanations work in BBO could be revisited such that if a bid is alerted the answer to any query goes against the bid as per the current method, but if a question is asked about a bid that hasn't been alerted the person who made the bid has an option to respond only to the person who asked (in which case the bid remain unalerted) or responded to both opps (in which case the bid becomes alerted).

I prepare written reports for some of the BBO matches I organise and make use of the export to text function in BBO. For those unfamiliar with it, you simply open a LIN file, click the printer icon and then say yes to "Export to Text File". I think the format of the text file could be improved in a few ways: 1. Put the board number, vul and dealer info in a corner to save some space. At present the hand diagram consumes 20 lines, where it could be done in 12 lines. 2. Get rid of the north, south, east and west lables in the hand diagram. 3. Put "!" next to alerted bids. Even better use (1), (2), (3), etc and footnote the actual explanations of the bids. 4. Have a running score after each board.

There will be some serious action in today's segment 7 with the first of two acrimonious appeal hands from the final coming up.

... but I've just finished converting all my calendars to Gregorian!

China actually has a single time zone for the whole country which is more-or-less geographically alligned to Beijing such that in the west of the country the sun gets up about 3 hours later than the east, which must be a drag for getting up in the morning but quite neat to enjoy lots of daylight after work in the evening.

Getting this thread back on the topic of the 1995 Bermuda Bowl Final, I had my first turn as an operator this morning and must say that it was one of the most enjoyable and rewarding vugraph operating sessions I've ever had. The experience was greatly enhanced by having one of the participating players (Joey Silver) commentating. It was particularly insightful seeing Joey's comments during a run of bad boards he and Kokish had mid-way through the 6th segment. The consistently high spectator numbers clearly indicate a demand for this sort of virtual vugraph presentation which I think we should try to replicate in future for closing stages of other major finals where we can secure some of the actual participants as commentators.

If you are using a LIN file from the Vugraph Archives to upload to a teams match on BBO, two important things: 1. You need to open the LIN file with a text editor and delete every second line so that there is only one copy of each hand. Otherwise board 2 will be the same as board 1, board 4 same as board 3, etc. 2. When you set up the teams match, tell one player to not click "accept" until you tell him to. This will buy you the 30 seconds or so you need to load the hands. The problem is that the moment the 8th player accepts a match invite, the match will start immediately before you've had a chance to load the hands.