smerriman

Bridge World Standard's version is: In a no-trump contract, it's usually pretty important for a low card to promise an honor, but there isn't a definitive answer, as you can have an agreement either way in this situation.

Ha, true, I can't add. The link is the important thing anyway, my script picks up the scores from that.

You lead from AKxxx, and see xxx in dummy. When partner has xx, which 'vast majority' of cases do you not want to give him a ruff? It is when partner plays low with both xx and xxx, as per your suggestion, when you completely lose, since you can't "try for a ruff anyway" without setting up declarer's queen for free in the latter case.

Wow, your partnerships must be truly awful. A good partnership would do none of the above. If partner can't see this is a tricky decision, and is going to resort to bidding badly in the future to punish you, or gets upset about who ends up declaring a certain hand, you really should be looking for a new partner (or a new hobby).

https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:65b754ee.cfd4.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1595832173&u=smerriman&v3b=web&v3v=5.6.5 smerriman 9 - 6 GIB

This doesn't mean "you should lead the ace of spades". It means if you are going to lead a spade, then it should be the Ace. Which shouldn't be new to you at all; it lines up perfectly with your first statement.

So what you really mean is nothing to do with private chat; you want to run team matches *without a director*. If so, that makes a lot more sense than the way you were wording it. I agree there doesn't seem to be a need for a director.

I'm not a Prime member, but when Prime was first introduced.. .. and I've definitely played at a Prime table before. So unless something has changed recently, are you sure you aren't able to?

Final: billyfung2 vs garant_7 Groups are assigned here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g8iohvklujaz5mc/Event%2020.xlsx?dl=0 Complete one 16 board, non-best-hand, MP challenge against in Round 2 that you have not yet played. The deadline for Round 2 is September 4, 11:59pm EST. Use "challenge a robot" to complete the challenges against GIB. This will not be automatically updated to advanced robots, but you can choose whether or not to do so as you wish. If you have challenges remaining against both of them, your first challenge will be scored against GIB1, with your second challenge against GIB2. Do not check the Advanced Robots checkbox - but all friend challenges will automatically be upgraded to advanced robots*. As per most previous events, the top 5 from each group will carry forward scores to a second round robin and play 10 more challenges against the other top 5s. - If a challenge hasn't been accepted in a day or two, cancel and reissue it to make sure you don't time out after the other player accepts. - Please only accept a challenge if you are positive you will be able to complete it in time. Partially completed challenges are annoying for everyone. - (At least) one player should report the scores of each challenge here by pasting a results URL. You can get the URL via History the tab, clicking Results, then the icon at the top right to open the results in a new window. The deadline for this round is August 15, 11:59pm EST.

I agree there are more than 288 Prime members. Vampyr said there were more than 19 Prime members. This is what "at least 20" means. You said Vampyr was wrong.

You're telling Vampyr she is wrong. She is not wrong; you are wrong. This is therefore everything about 'at least'. She did not say anything at all about being unhappy with the number of people in the prime area. She is unhappy about the fact you are taking a survey of 6 people and using it as evidence of what every prime member wants, when the number of prime members is large. Her definition of large was at least 20; the fact it is larger proves her point even more strongly. If you're going to post blatantly false information, you're going to have to put up with being corrected. If you're distraught about that, perhaps there is something better you could do with your time.

For the millionth time, AT LEAST is a synonym for GREATER THAN OR EQUAL TO. You were already provided definitions last time, but try Googling 'at least'. The very first definition is "not less than". Are you saying 20 is not less than 1000? The number of prime members is at least 20. This is a 100% fact. I don't know how you can write such long posts and have such a basic misunderstanding of English.

Not this again. You still haven't learnt the definition of 'at least' after last time? Her guess is 100% correct. And well over 1000 makes her point even stronger; namely, that quoting a sample of 6 people as evidence that everyone wants something is meaningless. You can request whatever you like. Saying "we" and implying everyone else agrees with you is something altogether different; as is implying that you must get you want above everything else.

Incidentally, the same applies to the prompt to explain your bid which is silent.

Perhaps the reason for the suggestion wasn't the greatest. That doesn't mean the suggestion itself was bad. A more common use-case is in the MBC when people get stuck for unknown reasons, sometimes for several minutes. When I'm not the host, rather than the more common approach of sending multiple question marks, I do take that time to multitask, waiting for a beep to tell me play has resumed. If that pause happens after I've made a claim, the card shuffling noise tells me they accepted but..

So you think the option for a sound should be removed entirely and not be given to anyone; fair enough. That's irrelevant to this discussion; given there is a sound effect when it is your action, there should be a sound effect any time it is your action.

For you maybe, and you can disable them; for me the sound when it's my turn is incredibly useful. Makes sense that it should at least be consistent.

Bump - 24 hours left for anyone who missed it.

I misread and thought you meant that if you hadn't completed the full set within 15 minutes you change sets. I'd think it's quite common for people to play a few hands at a time though, I've done that regularly in the past. Not sure you'd want to disadvantage people for taking their time. I guess that's true; with 500 sets you'd need to play on average about 28 tournaments to get a duplicate. Though despite the current issues I suspect there'd be far more complaints when people end with a rank out of 30 players in a 16000-wide tournament. They already are - that part works perfectly fine.

I'm not following this at all. If you have as many sets as you're suggesting, then you'll have virtually nobody to compare your scores to, which makes things even worse. And if someone takes longer than 15 minutes to play their 8 hands, they end up playing multiple sets, resulting in the original problem of being compared against different groups of people, but with even more variation thrown in due to less comparisons? The whole point of daylong is the ability to come and go, rather than it being 1440*something independent 15 minute tournaments.

Vampyr, it's probably worth having at least the faintest idea of what these tournaments are, before commenting on how to improve them. If you think 1000+ entrants is unrealistic, you may want to consider that the most recent tournament had 16000 entrants. I would hazard a guess this makes them popular enough that removing them entirely may not be a worthwhile suggestion. Your first option makes no sense with the format (a single player can take 24 hours between starting and finishing the tournament). And cheating was exactly the reason the second was avoided; even with 50 complete sets the birthday paradox means you only need to play a small number before coming across a duplicate. And a 'BBO anti-cheating mechanism' does not exist for these types of tournaments, other than the one being discussed.

You don't need to wait, or use such a tiny sample size; there is plenty of data available. I just picked a player at random (well, the first one I saw at a table) named 0752 and fed their username into http://www.bridgebase.com/myhands/index.php , going back 1 month. A quick script to pull out just the MBC hands gives a sample of 979 hands; East held 9 points on 78 occasions, for a probability of 7.97%. With random dealing, a 99% confidence interval around the known population proportion is (6.96%, 11.75%). As always, within normal expectations. I've done this so many times it's not funny.

So you're saying before playing those 76 deals, you specifically thought 'I wonder if East gets more 9 point hands than normal'; you then played 76 hands and looked at those statistics? Your story above seemed to suggest otherwise - that you came up with the hypothesis of 9 point hands *after* playing the hands and seeing the results. Which is a complete misuse of statistical analysis, and nullifies any statistical significance. With perfectly random hands, it is virtually guaranteed that you will be able to cherry-pick a statistic of interest that falls in the 'significant' range. You *must* make your hypothesis before generating a sample.

You're making the same basic mistake as everyone else. It is completely illogical to look at the data, see there are an unusual number of 9 point hands, and then calculate the odds of that happening. If you look at the data, there is always going to be something highly unusual in the results; the fact that it happens is meaningless; it is not statistically significant in the slightest. You must make an hypothesis, then look at the results from that point forwards.

I don't really see how that's similar, since you still have the ability to win your game. This is more likely saying your game rained out, and since you didn't play, you're not longer able to win the tournament. Well, I did have one idea which nullified the number of swingy hands you were dealt :)