SelfGovern

Even simpler... just un-select "auto-play singletons" under advanced options may stop this behaviour. I think I'd find it the height of annoying to have to confirm *every* play. It's always, as has been pointed out, an option to go back and review the last hand played.

Yes, it makes a great deal of sense. The BBO 'compatibility' rating is in its infancy. In fact, it may still be in the womb, and using it is like looking at cloudy ultrasound images from 20 years ago. The things they can measure now are almost orthogonal to compatibility -- I forget the list, but it includes things like language and average number of IMP/MP won or lost per hand (well, I've seen one pair on BBO who seem to *always* play with each other, so it would help in their case!). Expect it to get better, if it's possible for it to get better (and it may be too hard a problem for the resources BBO might want to devote to it). How do you measure compatibility at the bridge table when it's so many things that are almost impossible to measure? How do you take a fix? How well do you take and give captaincy as the opportunity arises? Are you a good defender? You've put 2/1 on your profile, but you're also an expert at Precision? When your partner makes a blatant error, how do you react?

"SA" (Standard American) is not "SAYC" (Standard American Yellow Card). SA is like saying "Acol" -- four or five card majors? What's your 2-bid structure? How do you respond to Multi 2D? etc. SA is a very-much-up-to-the-partnership collection of gadgets and styles they choose to suit themselves, with some of the few constraints being that it's typically a 5-card major, strong NT "system". SAYC on the other hand is a very well-defined set of conventions and treatments. It was developed (to the best of my knowledge) by the ACBL to allow partnerships to play a certain set of conventions (5-card major, strong NT based) with a minimum of gadgets (weak twos, Jacoby, Stayman, etc.) that allows for very little deviation (example: Want to play 2D opening as something other than weak? No can do. Bergen raises? Sorry.). See the card at http://web2.acbl.org/documentlibrary/play/sayc_card.pdf , or do a search for the SAYC system explanation in .pdf. This allows for a new partnership to sit down and play together with less chance of misunderstanding, and helps speed up certain games at tournaments, especially when only SAYC is allowed. It's called SAYellowCard because the convention card is supposed to be printed on yellow stock to make it easy to know your opps are playing SAYC and not some "complicated" system.

I like the four-hearts-long-clubs-weak-hand answer. There are bids to show invitational or forcing hands either in hearts, NT-ish, or hearts-and-clubs. But what if you have xx, Qxxx, x, KTxxxx? I find it useful to treat the auctions 1D - 1M; 1N - 3C and 1C - 1M; 1N - 3D to be similar 4M, 6(+)m weak hands.

I thought this thread was going to be about some new techniques in preemptive bidding. A title of "Go Away, Pre-Empts" would have clued me in to the real content! Grand Slam Force is perfect... except that it traditionally asks partner to bid seven with two of the top three trump honors. Nothing like being in 7S missing the ace. Perhaps you're in a partnership that has ways to differentiate between 2/3 and 3/3 -- if so, you may be golden (until opp gets wind and bid 6H over 5NT...).

What you say about the 1NT response is true for 1NT in response to a major: it's forcing, and can contain invitational-strength hands (such as 3-card support and 11 points, or a hand with another suit but not-quite-strong-enough to make a game-forcing 2/1 bid in that suit. 1NT over the minors (at least in 2/1 systems I'm familiar with) is not forcing, and denies a 4-card major, and is less-than-invitational strength.

OK -- four humans; for every 500-point set, you lose one of your squares. Or, for a set greater than (what?), opps get to mark a square as if they'd made their last bid contract. Fun fights over which of the pair gets to set the blot! There you go -- that could be fun. Probably swapping the human's relative positions after each hand; it might be too much of an advantage to always sit to the left of your human.

Well, 4NT is silly here; P could have an ace (Jxx, AQJxx, QJ, Kxx) and you need to stop in five, or he could have an ace and you're cold for 6S. (xxx, AQJxx, KQ, xxx). So if making a certain bid doesn't let partner tell you what you need to know, don't make that bid. Much of the discussion on hands like this depends on what the partnership agreements are. If N could have passed a 2S rebid, so that S has to jump to 3S to create a game force, then it's a whole different auction than if 2H is a game force, and frees up 3S not to show HCP, but to show a solid suit. Regardless, I bid 5C because I need partner to cooperate in the slam effort. Does he have the two aces I'm looking for? Or just one? If it goes 5C - 5H; I know he doesn't have the diamond ace, and I'll just bid 5S, knowing he is smart enough to trudge on with a second-round diamond control. If his continuation is below 6H, I'll trot out 6H to see if he thinks his hearts are good enough to play opposite something like this holding (Kx), and to protect his potential Kxx diamond holding on opening lead (unless his continuation was 5NT, in which case I raise to 6NT).

I wonder what it would be like to have a BINGO tournament with N/S a 2-person partnership (both people and best hand at the table held by one of the partners), and E/W bots. And whole 'nother idea: four person (two partnerships) BINGO. That will weed out the slow players...

It would be nice if in the results of bingo tournaments, you could post the time it took each player to reach BINGO. Morbid curiosity on my part -- sometimes I like to know how much I lost by. ;)

Opps open 1♥ and your partner jumps to 3♥: (1♥) - 3♥ My reading Way Back When said that this was an 8-trick hand (solid minor, plus the other two suits stopped) and asked P to bid 3NT if he could stop hearts, else bid 4 clubs pass or correct. Is this others' understanding as well, or do you take the jump cue to show a partial stopper in the bid major?

I can get to the side just fine -- the cursor becomes the double, opposite arrow icon, and ... nothing. I can't grab the edge and move it to change the size. I can slide the window when in windowed mode so that I have full access to two window edges... but I can't do a thing to change the size, only the position of the BBO window that I can never make smaller. Sure. There's an icon in the upper-right corner that is either "go to full screen" or "go to window". In full- screen mode, of course, you can never adjust the window border. In window mode, I can change the size of every browser window except the BBO window. For what it's worth, double-clicking on the top bar of a window toggles between full screen and window mode. That works fine... but the window still takes up the full screen, and can't be resized (although it can be moved). And again, the same things I can do to change the size of any other Firefox window Just Don't Work with my BBO Firefox browser window. Very odd.

Anybody who can check with firefox 13.0.1 on Win7?

Yes, I'm talking about the browser-based version, not the Windows version. I just checked, and indeed I can resize the window (at least on this computer) using ie, but with at least two other computers running Firefox, I can't (v 13 on one; the other was recently upgradd to 13, and I don't know which version it was running before, but the previous version also would not resize). So perhaps it's a Firefox issue? I guess I should try with Opera just for grins.

I used to be able to make the BBO browser client take up as much or little space on my screen as I wanted by dragging the edge of the BBO window. Now... it's full screen and all I can do is move it around. I'm not fond of this -- I have some monitors with nice resolution, and I don't want BBO taking up the whole thing (this is important when I'm just chatting, not playing). Am I missing something, or is this a change that was intentionally made? If intentional... I have to say that I don't like it. ;)

That's a nice table. I know I'd enjoy the chance to see that for the results in all the matches (it would get pretty complicated to do when the player count gets up into the 40s or hundreds, as it does for some tournaments). Is there any functionality to generate this in BBO?

I guess it's possible that pair "C" the top two places with us for each of the last four rounds. It would seem a bit unusual, though!

My partner and I played tournament "#2675 Speedball Pairs (IMP/Swiss)" and I thought the movement was a bit odd. There were four pairs, two full tables. Round 1, we played pair "A", boards 1 & 2. Round 2, we played pair "B", boards 3 & 4. Rounds 3, 4, 5, 6, we played pair "C", boards 5-12. This doesn't seem quite right; shouldn't the movement have had us play each of the three other pairs for four boards? If not, how were the pairings determined?

I'm not positive that I understand your question... but it sounds like you are asking how to answer when opponents ask what your bids mean. The answer is that you are required by etiquette and the laws of bridge to explain any agreement you and your partner have. You are NOT required to tell them what your hand is, but simply to explain your agreement with your partner. That includes, when appropriate, telling them not only what the bid shows, but what it shows you do not have -- that is, if a particular bid says you don't have a fit, you need to include that as part of your explanation. If you truly have no agreement -- even an inferred agreement -- then it is proper to say "We have no agreement." That said, the agreement you have may be an implicit agreement, such as, if you agreed to play 2/1, there's an implicit agreement that 1NT in response to a major is forcing and artificial, that a jump to three of your partner's minor is preemptive, etc. ALERT when appropriate, and explain fully. You are not supposed to answer your partner's questions at the table... admittedly, we sometimes sit and start playing too soon... that's happened to me a few times, and I will ask the opps if they mind me answering P ("Is 4NT Blackwood, 1430, or 0314?"). Since they *may* object... it seems best to not trot out a convention until you've had a chance to discuss.