Cthulhu D

Is this the thread? http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/33859-is-this-two-different-systems/page__hl__%2Balerting+%2Brandom It's a slightly different situation. Edit: Wait no, it's probably this one http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/47839-probabilistic-opening-bids/page__p__572575__hl__%2Balert+%2Brandom__fromsearch__1#entry572575 The method of randomization via shuffling cards is flawless and does not disclose infomation about your hand. You'd just have to remember to do it at the start of every hand. Alternatively adding the sum of your spot cards and the seconds hand of your watch and dividing will generate randomish numbers. Okay no you have to do the shuffling approach. A good idea anyway, you can 'preload' a truely random number every hand for playing from tight honours if nothing else.

I'm obviously guessing, but when you pull up the file he lists all the handshapes the bids were made on, so I think he;s looking at handshapes. This leads to silly results where vugraph operators have just entered the final contracts. A few weird 6 D openersin the fantunes one for example Ah okay, yeah I am still only up to including opener's rebid.

Wow, okay, I have yet to strike this problem. Do you know what the limitation is? How many rounds 'deep' were your constructive auctions?

I just thought it was beautiful.

I generally ask 'who checks the scores' after the first hand, and failing that give it to whoever I happened to be looking at at the time.. but I generally sit west because superstition and I like to move as much as possible because I get uncomfortable sitting at a small table for a protracted period of time. This is a good idea. I am going to start doing this - partly because I'm currently playing with some new players so seeing the scoring can only help.

You can also double click the FD alert and delete it I think. But yeah, I've only bothered for 1 level overcalls and 1NT which are generally natural.

When did you stop playing WoW? When they added 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 Arenas in 2007, they introduced an ELO based system for PvP matchmaking. It's actually a good example showing that even simple ELO ratings are enough in practice. WoW has another matchmaker (the stones for finding groups) that don't use a rating and are much more widely critiqued. WoW's K factor is 32 btw. This is all predicated on the fact you are going to display the matchmaking rating to users. I dispute this a good idea or even a requirement for implementing matchmaking. I'll note that most companies have stopped doing this in online implementations. If Adam cannot see his MMR, he will just sit opposite a bunch of self rated intermediate, advanced and experts and is unlikely to notice the difference. There is probably an argument not to display a users self rating if he is playing via the matchmaker as well. Edit: Of course, Adam should also be free to start a custom game and those games would have restrictions at all, functioning exactly like the current 'create a table' button.

Beats the standard American Model A) Invade B) Declare victory C) Withdraw in haste after a loss of popular support. See: Vietnam, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia (apparently the US won that too?). French model is the same except they skip all the bits where they might get shot first. Actually this is funnier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States Guess who won the Iran-Iraq war? AMERICA ***** YEAH.. wait what?

Please define 'game of their real skill level' This framework is unworkable. DOTA is the largest game (22 million players globally) I can think of that used this model. As anyone who has ever played it can testify, it does not function on any level. Indeed, picking up the game, reskinning it and adding matchmaking, ratings and the ability to reconnect was worth $50 dollars a shot to punters and has since spawned two other similar games (League of Legends and DoTA 2) that both offer the same added features. Drawing from experince with other online games it's pretty clear that punters want automated matchmaking not social controls, which as you mention don't even work properly. I may have misunderstood you. Please define what you mean by "the rating system will say." I am not clear how a rating system can say anything. If this is the ideal, why not institute matchmaking. I am a beginner, I am NOT good enough to judge. I want a system that does it for me.

This is not a contribution on how to alert it, but I bet it would be interesting. Run an experiment on what % of the time 4th seat balances if you explain it as 'a pre-emptive spade raise or a balanced hand with 2 spades' vs 'a balanced hand with 2 spades or a pre-emptive spade raise'

In post #92. You state There are a number of possible interpretations - you pick a very weird way of saying things with phrases like 'the rating system will say' (why will it say anything?), so it's quite hard to work out what you mean, but this is my guess: A) He will be blocked from playing with pre-arranged partners because the skill differential in the skill partnership is not addressed. I initally thought this was what you meant, but you corrected me in post #97. So I'm left with B) He has an overinflated perception of his own skill - Zenko self rates as 'expert' but the hypothetical is he's actually intermediate. In this scenario he will be matched with lower rated partners against equivalent opposition than in the current random scenario. Your hypothesis is presumably then he will play less because he's exposed to bad players sitting opposite, rather than being able to repeatedly leave matches until he gets an 'expert partner.' Note that this scenario is flawed. While Zenko may enjoy being able to partner with with better partners, the 'real expert' version of Zenko is going to be frustrated playing with an intermediate that claims he is an expert. This is a net neutral position - if people don't enjoy playing with players rated worse than them, as you hypothese here, someone is getting screwed. Additionally, because the ratings are self applied, it's functionally random. I self rate as beginner and am pretty damn bad, but I'm better than some of the advanced pards I've played with (e.g. the guy who hectored me for opening a balanced 19 count 1C playing a 15-17 NT). So anyway, analysing the hypothesis: The base case is the current system of pressing the 'take me a table' button. You get 3 random players + you. The proposed scenario is a matchmaker where you get 4 players of approximately equivalent skill levels. You state that he will play less when in a match-made game rather than a random game. As the 'cost' of playing wouldn't change between the two scenarios (same time investment, BBO is free), the only reason for him to play less is that he would derive less utility from playing. The only utility you can derive from playing a random match made game on BBO is personal enjoyment. Therefore the only logical interpretation I can reach of your statement is that matchmaking = reduced enjoyment. If you meant something else, I do not understand the point you are trying to make.

I strongly disagree with your assertion here that a completely random match-up of 4 players around a table is likely to be more enjoyable than 4 match made players for any given player.

This is bad - the matchmaker needs to control +/- skill differentials permitted to optimize queuing times. Also, if your rating system is functional why reset it ever? I agree masking of the actual rating is fine. If you have a bizarre compulsion to include a displayed rating, avoid using the underlying ELO or TrueSkill, band them up and display the lowest grade in the uncertainty range. Do not use real world terms either. 'Intermediate' 'Advanced' etc are just going to get on people's nerves. If you held a gun to my head and demanded displayed ratings, I'd use the Starcraft 2 model, and probably with less bands. Starcraft is VERY clever in that it seperates the displayed rating from the matchmaking rating(!). So basically the player base is sorted into buckets: Grandmaster: Top 200 players Master 2% Diamond 18% Platinum 20% Gold 20% Silver 20% Bronze 20% Within each bucket, players are grouped into divisions (of 100 players), and you get 'Masterpoints' (actually Blizzard points) when you play games and this number never decreases, so you generally steadily climb your division rank. Plus instead of being rated against the totally meaningless pool of BBOers, you actually see how you are doing against a pool of roughly equal players. Also you get to be in more top 10 lists. But this is totally separate from the MatchMaker rating. Just if you matchmaking rating creeps into the range of values expected for another bucket and stays there, Blizzard will give you a bump. If BBO was going to do this, chop out all tiers under gold and fold them into 'gold' and let people assign themselves a Beginner rating for their first 50 matches (probably 300 boards) if and only if they want to.

I'm not particularly confident that it is particularly standardized, but Googling turns up half a dozen subtly different descriptions most of which mention that you have a neutral card.

It's a bit cleverer than that - it's that due to Germany's geographic situation, historically it (or its composite states) have partnered up with France OR Russia to the determent of the other (When it's tried 'none of the above' it tends to come unstuck). France and co would like to lock it in to one team.

Why does any rating system have to say that? Or do that? PGR will let me party with anyone I choose regardless of skill. DOTA 2 doesn't try and tell me I shouldn't play with Kilthix and Gladius because they are much better than me. It juts tries to get a good 5v5 together. I do not understand why putting a matchmaking system behind the 'take me to a table' and 'take me to a table I have a partner' would be anything other than an obvious upgrade. Implementing a matchmaker requires ratings. Ratings does not require skill display or any other controls.

Err, no. America has a fiscal union that is almost 200 years old. (well, IMHO it's actually about 156, but you know, whatever). The South is basically Spain/Italy/Greece etc and it's supported by transfer payments from the north.

1065? More seriously, Robson seems to still play in national events - does he still play this style? I think at the end of the day the point - about the need to show fit ASAP and judging double fits/ODR as key to taking the 5 level push etc are probably worth taking away even if you don't adopt his style.

It was a tramp steamer last time! I guess that's coming up trumps?

It's 'Full Disclosure' one of the programs that comes with the Window's BBO client. Basically it's a system for comprehensively capturing system information then providing automated alerts to opponents during play. There is a forum for it down here: http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/forum/33-full-disclosure-and-dealer/ It's basically a super convention card, you can click into bids and see what responses mean etc. Very nice but somewhat time consuming to create the card. However, this tool and the BSS scripting system created by Kungsgeten help the process. I've made one for the system I use with my regular partner which is very useful for playing on BBO with a somewhat artifical system - good alerting and disclosure.

It's a massive advantage. If I can sell my olive oil for 10 US dollars and it costs 10 Euro to make, and I can swap 1 US dollar for 1 Euro, I don't make any money. If suddenly people will give me 10 Euros for 1 US dollars, instantly I am making a huge pile more money. Now I can slash the price of my olive oil and still make a decent profit. Now consumers are much more likely to buy my olive oil than Croatian or whatever. I can increase my volumes, employ more people domestically etc. This is overly simplified of course, but this is what you get. I have to pay way more for anything I import, but this makes my domestic economy stronger! It's now more economical for the locals to buy domestic rather than overseas. It's why the Chinese are screwing the US - they artificially prop up the US dollar which damages the US manufacturing industry.

It's actually Dodds, in true bridge style it's some dude's name. Anyway, it works like this: Discarding an even card is encouraging Discarding an odd card asks for the suit of the same colour. Discarding an encouraging card for the suit you are showing out of shows that you are unable to signal for what you want, or have nothing to say. I am pretty sure this is horrible, but lots of people around here (Oz) play even is encouraging and odd is Lavinthal! (I can almost understand revolving here) on all discards AND when following suit(!!?!) which may actually be worse.

That's true for a deposit taking institution, but not for an investment bank. The two behave very differently. Yeah, while Germany and Sweden both have better governments, more effective regulations etc, the Germans currently benefit from the Greeks etc artificially holding down the value of their currency. Basically German goods are substantially cheaper because the Greeks don't know how to run a country (tip: like the Swedes). This is why the Germans want to perpetuate the status quo - it's hugely beneficial to them. They basically get the same benefits of currency manipulation that the Chinese do, except it happens automatially. The greeks on the other hand either need massive inflation or to default on their loans or both or, altenatively, leave the euro zone enabling them to tank their currency - then they will become much more competitive overnight.

Open: MonacoItalyPolandNetherlandsIsraelSweden

FD cards do work for competitive bidding btw. Also, that's really cool, will have to give it a throw. I'd love to see Fantoni-Nunes and/or Meckwell's as well.