Deanrover

1. Vul v Not KQ K75 KT53 AQT3 Two passes to you and you open 1N. P bids 2H (trf) and rebids 3S. Your call? 2. White v Red AJ9765 AQ KT872 Playing 2/1 you open 1s after one pass. P bids 1N, you bid 2D (agree?), p rebids 2s. Your call? What if Exclusion was available? 3. All vul AJ876432 J9 8 42 4. All non AJ9863 7 K54 982 2H pass 4H to you. What now? 5. All vul 6 A62 963 QJ9543 1D p 1H x 2H How many clubs do you bid?

The situation: You are enjoying a nice game of bridge in the Main Bridge Club with your favorite partner Jo. You click the "tournament" tab and see this cool tournament starting in 45 minutes. The problem is, numbers are limited and it rates to sell out fast. Therefore, in order to sign up for it, you have to interrupt your game, click "back" a few times, go to the tourney area, sign up, click "back" a few more times and sit down at the table again. The ability to sign up for a tournament whilst playing would be sweetness. Dean

Btw, you wouldnt want to reverse with a 4~6 or 4~5 hand because your pard has already denied 4 spades.

E.g. 1H~1N 3C, 3D are both natural 3H is natural, emphasis on hearts, and invitational. 3S, 4C, 4D are self supporting splinters. 2S is a GF relay to 2N. However partner can break it with slam interest and a suit/ 3C shows the 5~6 type hand 3D shows a 3613ish hand 3H shows a 3631ish hand 3S shows a 1633ish hand 3N shows 0544. Haven't really put too much thought into optimal responses, but this should kick off the debate.

Assume 2/1. You open 1H, p replies 1N, you bid 2S. What natural hands coudl you have? Well you must be 5~6 at least in the Majors, with a hand strong enough to reverse, but not strong enough to open 2 clubs with. This seems way too restrictive. Time and time again I see people struggle with rebids over 1H~1N. Typically this is when they have a hand like Axx AKJxxx x AKx and they vascillate between 4H, 4d (splinter) and 3C. Normally they make a Fake Jump Shift into 3C. It is not nice to lie to partner. Furthermore, when you actually do have a 3C bid, i.e. Ax AKJxx x AKxxx Partner has no idea whether you have a real suit. How good a holding is QTxx in clubs? IMHO 2S should be used as a relay to 2N in order to allow better hand definition. Does such a scheme exist?

Hi, the newish feature whereby the sound for private chat and the sound for a friend logging in are different is excellent. Now when one hears the "beep" you can be confident that you have received a private message. BUT it is really annoying when you hear the beep and stop doing whatever you were doing, only to find it is a message from Clubx saying "Come and sign up, tourney starts in 5 minutes!". Perhaps BBO should treat club news similar to public rather than private chat. Dean

LHO leads says he doesn't have the Club K, Q or J. Presuming from your description none of these have fallen, RHO has 5 clubs. After his diamond discard it seems likely he has 2155 distribution. So don't pull the final trump. Ruff the club high. Ace of spades, spade finesse. If this wins you are home. If he has Qx you are home providing you get diamonds right. If he has Qxx you need to cash top two spades and endplay him, but you were never going to do that. No. This doesn't work. If East does have Qx x xxxxx KQJxx then after winning the Spade Queen he can win by firing through the final club. Back to study :lol:

Jo. What can one say about Jo? She has played bridge for at least a decade and yet it completely clueless. She regularly passes splinters. Her cardplay is mystifying. We suspect she only plays bridge because of the large number of eligible men available. You can, literally, hear her clock ticking as you talk with her. Heathercroft. A place full of fun. Those of you who read the EBU magazine might recall the issue 3 years back that mentioned a club with two 100 yr olds. This is Heathercroft. The average age is 90ish. However, the atmosphere is extremely friendly, and for £1 you get 24 boards of bridge, free tea/coffee and biscuits. The winners gets £2, so actually the afternoon is a guaranteed profit of a Quid. The players are Heathercroft have an excrutiating knack of never, ever claiming. Once I had the trump Ace in hand and said "I make the Trump boss, the rest are yours", she replied "No no dearie, lets play them out". One afternoon I was roped into playing with Jo. We bid to 6NT, always a risky proposition with Jo as declarer. The defence started by cashing the Ace of Spades. Jo then spread her hand, claiming "The rest are mine...........I think (giggle)" "No no dearie, lets play them out". "But I have 3 Spades, 4 Clubs, 2 Hearts and 5 Diamonds!" Amazingly enough, for once, Jo's analysis was accurate. There were no less than 14 cast iron, off the top tricks. "No no dearie, lets play them out." You can guess the punch line.

Hi all, Let me start. When I was 17 I played in a London Schools' bridge tournament. The general standard was, ahem, well I can't lie, it really wasn't that good. On the final board, you pick up [hv=s=skqhq4dkj832cat74]133|100|[/hv] at favourable vulnerability. LHO opens 2C and partner passes. RHO thinks for a few seconds, his eyes flitting between his cards and his bidding box. And then, without warning, he tilts his bidding box over and *plop* all 35 bidding box cards thud on to the table. He had bid 7NT. After checking that we were all using the same pack, I doubled very quickly and led the club ace (Yes, I was paranoid about them having 13 top tricks!). Dummy meekly tabled[hv=s=skqhq4dkj832cat74]133|100|[/hv] The plump young man's face was a mixture of shame and horror as he said "Sorry partner, I thought we were playing Weak Twos". To compound the misery declarer had a singleton club and after 5 minutes, intermittently painful and embarassing, punctuated with laughter, we chalked up 1700.

I don't think two nights is enough to entice people from, say, New York to UK. Maybe 3 or 4 nights would be a good compromise. I think Cambridge would make a fantastic venue. It is a historic, gorgeous and quaint city. It is close to Stanstead and London. Say, summer 2005?

Given that you winning at rubber bridge, how much bankroll do you require? This really boils down to: what are reasonable R.O.R and S.D values for rubber bridge?

There have been a few previous attempts at organising a BBO "reunion". Official stuff, hotels etc. I think they suffered from lack of demand. BBO has expanded v. much over the past year. I suspect that there now exists demand for a well attended BBO holiday. Assume a central location such as East Coast USA or Western Europe. Perhaps England is best :) 1 week long, bridge planned for every day but optional excursions to Stonehenge, Cambridge etc. Stay in a nice country hotel.

Agree with number two too!

Next to "New Topic" is "New Poll". Dean

It is now 20:00 Paris Time and the Womens' final rooms have still not closed. It must be a good 90 minutes since the match concluded. The drawback here is that many users will come online, see the "Live vugraph is now in progress" bar, think "cool", go into the vugraph and find that it has, in fact, finished. A minor nuisance.

[hv=n=sa75hkqd863ct6532&w=st9642h2dkqt2caq4]266|200|Scoring: IMP[/hv] After a 1N-2C-2H-3N auction you lead a low club. Declarer plays the Queen from dummy and partner plays the club 9. Assume UDCA. Trick Two is spade 2, 8, King. Plan the defence.

Often as a yellow I would receive the message "Could you please come to Teams Match 541 because 4 players have left, the director is not here, and I can not escape" So the yellow goes to the Team MAtch and closes it down. This is a waste of Yellow time. Furthermore, what if no yellows are available? Clearly something needs to be done. A solution is thus. When playing in a Teams match, click "table" and a "request teams match is cancelled" button appears. Click this and all participants receive a message "Userx has requested this Team Match be cancelled. Agree/disagree" If enough people concur then the match is cancelled. I am not sure what the optimal number is. Definitely more than half (else a losing team could bail out). Maybe it should be 100%. Many factors to consider.

"Those of you make rude posts about our hard work likely appreciate us too." Fred, I think you are taking this far too personally. No one has personally attacked you, Uday, Sheri, Herve etc. on this post. I have not noticed anyone claim that you are not working hard. When you claim that BBO could not aspire to Swan's coverage of Malmo as they are apples and oranges, I think you miss the point. Swan's coverage included features such as the ability to click on a team name and and have all their results listed. Since all this data had already been entered into the system the fact that there were 4 times as many tables as in Malmo is really irrelevant. The fact is that the coverage has been disappointing in many ways. Yes, I appreciate it and yes it is much better than before. But we have the right to point of specific areas that could be improved upon. I am 99% certain that no one is that people are posting in here in order to disparage your work. On the contrary, because BBO usually achieves the highest levels of excellence, this creates exceptional levels of anticipation and then an innovation has significant flaws it is bound to be disappointing. I hope that you can take the criticisms here in a constructive light and implement some improvements.

Hi, when operating vugraph it is common to make a mistake and only notice 3 or 4 tricks later. You then need to click "undo" 15 times in order to rectify your error. This is time consuming and unsightly. When clicking undo, a box should appear where you can input the number of actions you want to retract. Dean

Hi Doofik, in the Main Bridge Club you have the option to set up a table with "Kibitzers required to ask permission", and you have the option to enter Tournaments with Kibitzers disallowed. If you decide to sit at any other kind of table then you have to accept the kibitzers. If this particular user's comments are offensive, then email abuse@ Dean

When moving your cursor over a tournament it will often say "restrictions: language/country" but not state which language and which country! I think BBO should definitely expand upon the description of restrictions. Furthermore, it might be an idea not to list tournaments which a user is ineligible for. This would make things more simple, and would also cut down on users altering their profile in order to become eligible for a tourney. I also find the "restrict by language" function perplexing. For example, 90%+ of BBO users speak competent English at worst, yet probably only 15% come from Anglophone countries. Furthermore there are many users such as Booze and Walddk who are fluent in 5 or more languages. Using country of origin as an indication of linguistic ability is inaccurate and, in cases, misleading. An "Anglophone" only tournament would permit David Beckham and deny Thierry Henry, but we all know who speaks better English :o

You should not be able to turn off Yellow Chat.

The service is markedly improved. i) The scores are now very up to date ii) The "movie" bug is fixed One thing about the movie however is that you can not see play by play accounts, even if the match had been broadcast on BBO. This would be a fantastic (and logical) feature. The general problems with navigation still exist. Many have mentioned the example of Swan Games coverage of the European Championships as an example for BBO to aspire to, and I support this. Dean

I suspect that the majority of BBO users have lobby chat turned off. This because there is a low "signal to noise ratio" - i.e. most lobby chat is useless information to the vast majority of users. As a result of this BBO has resorted to making Broadcasts about issues such as vugraph - information that the vast majority of users probably find helpful, but that some, I suspect, find deeply irritating. However, there are some pieces of information I would find useful. For example, I might want to be informed of when tournaments are due to start, when tournaments need substitutes, when vugraph is about to start, when someone needs an extra player for a teams match etc. It would be sweet to have the option to customize what I receive. Users would have the choice of either sending out a general lobby message, or chat via a particular "stream". E.g. is a host wanted an eighth player to fill his teammatch there would be an "option-send player request" and this could be filtered, so that the message was only sent out to expert players, players from Poland, players currently not playing etc. When all the filters were set, an automated message is sent out. e.g. Automated message: Bob Hamman requests Advanced + player to compete in Teams Match wowowowowowow. Info: 8 board IMPs, players: Zia-Reece Bush-Kerry etc. Messages relating to Vugraph would be hard to automate but this could be circumvented by allowing Yellows a "vugraph" chat function in addition to "broadcast". This would allow the user to kibitz or wait in the lobby and receive pertinent information without being spammed by Mrx and MrsYs' flirting or MotherJo's recipe for Chicken Soup.

Presuming you have sound on your PC this issue is addressed in the latest versions of BBO. You can choose to hear an extremely pleasant sound when receiving tournament invitations.