mrdct

From the Hilton, Newport Wales, website: http://www.hilton.co.uk/property/1015_Room...6&rmid=11018443 "Hilton Double Standard Guest Bedrooms all have large double beds, a work desk, two telephone points, PlayStation, internet access, interactive televisions, trouser press and complimentary tea & coffee making facilities." I would expect that internet access in the room would probably be around US$25 per day; still a rip-off but presumably affordable in the context of what they wanted for internet access in the playing area.

How about some practical solutions? 1. How much will the Hilton charge for an analogue phone line? Dial-up is perfectly OK for BBO coverage of one or two tables sharing a single phone line and quite easy to set up. 2. In the event that even an analogue phone line in the playing area is cost prohibitive, how about just broadcasting from one table and put that table in a guest room with the bed pushed to one side? I believe screens aren't used in the Camrose, so there should be plenty of room. Whilst hotel telephone charges tend to have an expensive flag fall (around US$1 per call at most 5-star hotels I've stayed at around the world) you should be able to get a prepaid dial-up ISP account that has a local or toll-free access number.

Vugraph of IMP pairs is often a little bit boring due to the lack of comparisons. I wonder if it would be technically feasible to have GIB instantly calculate the par score for a board and present that as the "closed room" result against which the open room result can be compared.

I quite like it. It would be useful in situations where BBO is being used for on-site vugraph in a commentator-less environment to only have to select GIB once for the segment. If you could do this, as soon as the auction is over the GIB indicators will come up automatically without having to reselect it each hand. One thing I have noted is that it can't cope with a contract that is going more than 9 down (although such a situation probably won't crop-up too often). Following on from Nick's other comment about displaying the makeable contracts in a similar manner to the way DealmasterPro does for printed hand-records, perhaps an indicator of the double-dummy par-score would be useful.

One of the larger bridge clubs in Melbourne (running two competition sessions of about 30 tables and six duplicates of between 10 and 30 tables per week) introduced screens a couple of years ago for the knockout stages of its major annual teams event ("the Pennant"), late stages of Grand National Teams qualifiers and all selection events once they are down to 12 tables or less. The screens were well received by virtually all players, many of whom got a real sense of playing in something important; providing further motivation to improve their bridge and qualify for other events where screens are used. In my own personal experience, even if it's a relatively insignificant club teams event, if I sit down to play with screens I invariably find myself far more mentally focussed.

It is much to better to reduce the volume of unauthorised information floating around than to put players under ethical pressure to evaluate their "logical alternatives"; regardless of how ethical your opponents are. There will always be grey areas with UI and screens eliminate a large portion of UI situations. I generally find it far more relaxed with screens as you can do things behind the screen that would be quite awkward without screens for fear of passing unauthorised information to partner. Playing with screens also allows you to engage in a level of social intercourse with your screenmate that would not be possible without screens. Screens also largely eliminate post-mortems making it much easier to move on to the next board after a bad hand.

Yes, it's amazing what can be achieved with a decent internet connection and a little bit of planning and preparation. I'm intrigued as to why screens aren't used. I must say, I find it hard to take an event seriously if screens aren't used. It makes it look more like a social get-together than a prestigious bridge event.

I too find the process of rejecting a new joiner to the table quite difficult in situations where I have a replacement player lined-up, the departing player leaves and before I get a chance to reserve the new player's seat, an avalanche of requests arrives which prevents me from editing the table details. I think this is a genuine bug in the software. Also, the "close and reject all" button doesn't seem to have that effect. If I click that button, more requests keep coming.

I've recently been doing quite a bit of online preperation for an upcoming face-to-face event with a long distance partner (16,000 km). We both have "stars" and often play against one or more "stars" so kibitzer numbers up around 100 or more are not uncommon which inevitably leads to some degree of stupid and/or inappropriate comments being made to the table. I am usually reluctant to bar kibitzer chat as the occassional "happy new year" or "good luck everyone" doesn't bother me and some of the people I'm playing with and against have students watching with whom they may want to converse to explain a particular learning point. When it does get out of hand, however, it becomes necessary to verbally warn kibitzers to "keep their analysis to themselves" and if that doesn't work, bar kibitzer chat. I think the required functionality in the Main Bridge Club should be for the table host to be able to tick a box which prevents enemies of either himself or possibly all four players at the table from kibitzing. That way, any kibitzers that do act inappropriately can be immediately silenced without spoiling it for everyone else. Perhaps the way the Main Bridge Club table settings are structured could replicate tournament functionality where entry as a player or kibizer can have restrictions such as "friends only", "excluded enemies" and "custom list".

It's quite simple - availability of a reliable internet connection should be in the venue selection specifications for all major events. If you have a reliable internet connection, have checked your hand data files and practiced for half a dozen hands, there really isn't anything that can go wrong with a BBO vugraph broadcast.

As I said, I'm no great expert on scanning, but I have received scanned documents in tiff format before that were really clear and only about 100k per page.

I've just done a test of the closed room data for the 1st segment and it took 59 minutes for the 16 boards. I was reading the info off a computer screen, so I'm sure it would be much faster if I had printed the scanned pages out and highlighted the sections of the text with the play details. A possible compromise for fans of two-table coverage would be for the closed room operator to enter the play data as quick as they can, whilst the open room operator enters data at a more relaxed pace. I think it will be quite an art for the operators to find the right pace and the right places to send the players into the tank. I think the operators can be somewhat guided by the match reports where the length of the discussion of particular points of play could be a good guide to slow down a bit. The commentators can also help out a bit by advising the operator to slow down a bit if necessary. Carding is quite interesting too. The match reports usually don't describe the actual pips so some knowledge of the general carding style of the players would be useful info to give the presentation a tad more realism. I'm not a great expert on scanning, but it may be better to scan the match reports in tiff format rather than jpeg.

As one of the early supported of the virtual vugraph concept for old BB finals, I'm more than happy to chip in for some operating duty. The proposed window of 2nd or 3rd week of January sounds good to me. I'd be interested to hear what people think about whether the virtual coverage should be single-table or dual-table. I would suggest an invisible operator rapidly key all the closed room data for a segment upon start-up and the open room (visible) operator then pace him or herself at around 5 minutes per board and enjoy the luxury of being able to actually act upon an instruction by the commentators of "next". Commentators and spectators will be able to look at the full bidding and play from the closed room as and when they want to and we wont be diluting commentator resources and spectator numbers.

I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. I am suggesting a LIN file viewer for PDAs. Such a program would have nothing to do with BBO per se and I imagine would be primarily used for viewing vugraph data maintained by Nikos Sarantos. There are already several 3rd party programs that can deal with LIN files (such as converting them to and from other formats or outputing them to a text-based summary of bidding and play). I don't think writing or publicly advocating a LIN file viewer for PDAs has any relationship whatsoever to the agenda of others to develop clients for other operating systems

The platform that I'm keenly interested in seeing some development is Pocket PC or Microsoft Mobile. I accept that a full working version of BBO is far fetched, but how about a LIN file viewer so people can watch replays of vugraph and their own play on PDAs rather than having to fire-up a laptop (which can be quite a hassle on a bus). From my limited understanding of computer programming, this wouldn't require access to BBO's source code, just an understanding of how a LIN is file is structured which is public domain. There are several PDA bridge programs around that manage to fit the hand diagram on the screen OK. Omar Sharif's program is an example: http://www.clickgamer.com/products/omar_sharif_bridge/screenshots/ppc/large/omar_sharif_bridge_1.gif

South's actions don't seem unreasonable to me. 2NT looks like lebensohl, even in the absense of discussion, or possibly one or both of North and South had "leb" written in their profile. Of course South is also a passed hand which makes 2NT look even more like lebensohl. 3H by North is obviously a unilateral GF (possibly even showing a ♥ stopper in some people's methods) so South took a reasonable view that his ♥J may be good enough to stop the suit if partner has at least a partial ♥ stopper and he may also be influenced by the fact EW didn't raise ♥. NS clearly have game values on the auction and if they are playing matchpoints I think 3NT is the obvious choice and probably the indicated bid at IMPs also. You'll have to come up with a few better examples than that before I had any suspicions as to South's integrity.

Security for vugraphed events is quite simple to organise if you apply the following protocols: 1. Players not allowed to have any electronic communication devices on their person during session time (irrespective of whether or not such devices are switched off). 2. Players can only leave the playing area to go to the toilet under escort of a tournament official, neutral kibitzer or opposing player. 3. Kibitzers cannot move from table to table, cannot enter the playing area after play has started and cannot re-enter the playing area if they leave.

The only way to avoid this would be for the broadcast to be terminated after the end of each 3-board round and the operator reloading the next three boards and starting a new show every 27 minutes. To do it properly, the hand data file would also need to be split into 9 3-board files which is a fair bit of fiddling around.

If 1996 onwards has already been done, how about targetting 1989 (Brazil v USA), 1991 (Iceland v Poland), 1993 (Netherlands v Norway) and 1995 (USA v Canada incl Fred). Incomplete descriptions of the play wont be a major problem as we always have the claim button or can take some poetic licence with the spot cards. I think preparing the .dup files will be quite labourious, but there wont be any need to do any "homework" on the play as the virtual operator will have plenty of time to work out what the play was during the virtual show as he tries to stretch the play out to 3 or 4 minutes per hand.

It occurs to me that it will be problematic to do BBO vugraph of pre-1987 Bermuda Bowl finals because the scoring for non-vul doubled undertricks was different. Perhaps it would be better to work backwards from a recent, but pre-internet vugraph Bermuda Bowl finals.

Getting the hand records into .dup format may require a fair bit of effort, but I'm willing to put my hand up to do it for one old BB final.

Here's an idea: How about running some "virtually live" replays of old Bermuda Bowl finals on BBO such that the data entry can be done as a BBO vugraph broadcast and people and commentators can watch. The play could be much faster than usual too, perhaps 4 minutes per board. Would be quite good for training new operators too.

Why on earth would you want to install their music player in the first place?

I've travelled quite a bit throughout Thailand in recent years and generally found internet availability pretty good, especially in Phuket, so I'm sure we haven't heard the last from you. Best of luck for this next stage of your life!

When sitting at a table, click the "options" icon and then about half-way down on the right click "show" under the heading "NSEW".