ochinko

Being such a great player I don't need many memory aids but my partner sometimes has trouble recognizing the meaning of my doubles. So it would be nice to have "Harvest Time" alert in doubling visible (only?) to my partner. Online bridge robs us of so many verbal and non-verbal signals during bidding and defending in standard f2f bridge that it would only be fair to compensate somehow for the lack of them.

LHO looks like 3=1=4=5. I take ♠A, then finesse the ♥Q. ♣AKx ruffing the last one in dummy, and finesse the ♥10 if LHO started with 3=0=5=5. I got my 10 tricks now, and if LHO started with ♦AQ, I am +1. Looks too easy. I must be missing something. Perhaps LHO started with 2=0=5=6. If RHO overrufs the third club, a spade will be played, and I'll have to play diamonds myself. My only chance then is to find LHO with the Queen and RHO with the Ace. Small towards the ♦J will give me my 10th trick (after drawing trumps). Edit: Oops, miscounted the trump honors, not surprisingly.

I bid 3♥ directly. 8 losers, almost an opening hand. It has the drawback of not giving partner enough information whether we have 1 or 2 fits, but it also doesn't draw a map for the defenders. After 1♥ - 1♠ partner will describe his hand further, and opps will benefit twice while the gain for us is questionable at best.

Nice one Free :D Doesn't seem to work on BBO though :( It still might work in the local club or against an intoxicated opponent. I've met such people in a tournament. They won't even remember it clearly afterwards, so they'll hate you with a lesser passion. B) And a resolution that I literally wrote in a noteboook a couple of months ago: I will never take a non-needed finesse again.

There's smaller chance for 2♦ to be passed by partner than it is for 2♥. It depends what 1NT could be. I have a nice shape with only 5 losers, so the final destination seems to be 4♥. If partner's hand is limited, then I could well bid them right away, so 4♥ is my second choice, but we'll lose the chance of finding a ♦ slam.

Very nice and touching post. Perhaps because I recognize myself B) In the local club, or in an ordinary tourney at least 80% of the results can be achieved with a 10% effort if a person is intelligent enough. Now, when you know how much harder you have to work for the rest, it just doesn't seem to worth it if you're not a pro. Sometimes, of course, it's humiliating to hear: "Partner, you knew West had 5 hearts and 4 clubs from the bidding, and he showed 2 spades, so he couldn't have had more than 2 diamonds." "Ouch! Was it really that easy? Was I really that stupid?" B) We must strive to become better players, but not at all cost. Not if the cost is losing the fun, as the others have said. Unfortunately, it's not fun for your partner if he happens to be much better than you. Apart from my general lazyness, I blame it on the early years of my play when we knew nothing, there was noone to teach us, no books, no internet, we played it by the ear, counting all suits/points was unheard of, and those bad habits die hard.

Actually you could enjoy defending even 5♥ if opps hearts are 4:4, and LHO doubles 4♠ as a takeout. :)

1♥ - 1♠ 2♦ - 2NT 3♣ is artificial, so 2NT should show clubs, no? Not only do I have 10 pts, but the long club could provide some tricks when it meets an honor in partner's hand as is the case. I like to keep it simple, and bid what I have. If I don't start with 1♠, how am I going to describe my hand? Is there a chance to find a spade contract when partner has KQ Axxxx xxxxx A

Technically the right bid to me seems to be 3♠ in 3rd, and 1♠ in 1st/2nd position, but I too am willing to put maximum pressure upon opps, and bid 4. Opps are likely to have a game, and they could miss a slam, or bid a non-existing one when their bidding space is stolen. Besides, what better vulnerability could there be?

Many thanks for your answer, Fred. I don't know whether I am on the same wavelength (got to think and read more about these issues) but it was important for me to know your opinion because of the respect I have for your work, achievements, and general personality. Now, as big a fan of Free Software I am, I don't think "Free" should be compulsory. Every author has the right to put whatever license he thinks fits best to his product, otherwise where is the freedom? If I had built a business around BBO, I too would probably never risk opening its source. I hope your time on this thread won't be wasted, other people will read it, understand your concerns, and hopefully lessen the pressure for you to open the source. Your stance was not "obvious" to me, so there is a chance that it is now more obvious to others too. Personally, the WINE compatibility suits me fine today. There is only the danger for tomorrow. You could win the lottery <_< , and lose interest in BBO. Now where will we all be? You should realise that there are no good Free or Open Source bridge software products simply because bridge is (unfortunately) not popular enough. Petko Boukov Sofia, Bulgaria

Quite an interesting topic. What I didn't understand was the part about reverse engineering being considered parasitism by Fred. If I were to write a hand viewer, I'd like to include as many formats for bridge notation as possible. Not all of them are made public, so I'd have to look inside files in non-published formats in order to parse them right. I'd have to get them right by trial and error. This is something of a reverse engineering. Next, if I had the time and motivation, I could write a client program that connects to a server. Since the network protocols are unpublished too, I'd have to log the traffic between the client and the server, analyze it, and reimplement it many times for all the bridge servers that are there, since they all use their own protocols. Would Fred consider me a parasite if I do that? Would others?

3H from me. I can't bid 3D because that would ask partner to bid 3NT with a diamond stopper. Since I stop the diamonds, 3D is meaningless. Is partner bids 3S now, I'll go to 3NT.

To repeat diamonds not forced partner must have 6 of them. We might well have all the diamond honors, but we won't make many diamond tricks if clubs are trump. I bid 3♦, and let the Law protect me. Can't pass here, and double seems reckless. Btw, thanks for splitting different problems in different threads. Hope others will follow your example. Petko

Nice post, Paul. It's great to be able to combine two passions - free software and bridge. I am with BBO 4.50 (the special variant), WINE 0.9.1 on Kubuntu 5.10. Petko

It's not about hanging partner, it's about trying to achieve a decent score. We both bid suits, and I have 2 Aces outside them. We have no heart fit, so opps don't have two fits, only a spade one. Besides, the opening doesn't suggest a possible crossruff. I believe many pairs will stop at 2D making 3, but at most tables opps won't reach 3Sp. So not only I double, but I pray for -2, otherwise we have a bottom score anyway. Partner must have an honor outside hearts, so in the worst case his hand would look something like this: xx KJTxxx xxx Qx

No way am I going to leave the opps undoubled here. Even at IMPs I would hardly pass. Petko

Since it's MP I invite with 2NT, but I wouldn't mind 3NT too. At IMPs I bid 3NT after the transfer. When HCP are borderline, as here, what matters (especially at NT) is the fillers, and mine are excellent: two Tens and two Nines with semisolid hearts. Petko

Hi Robert. It is not my partner. The poster clearly says that it is not an established partnership. You are indeed right that it would be an insult to a regular partner to disregard his sign-off but this doesn't seem to be the case. There are two rules I know that I would follow in partner's situation: 1. If you don't understand a bid, you treat it as natural. 2. You don't pass such a bid. This could well be the case that partner just couldn't let the bidding die, so he bid 3NT. I don't know whether it would be ethical to bid 6H, and whether the TD would revert the score to 4H +2. Perhaps mikestar is right. I just think that 6H has pretty good chances. Petko

Even at MP this is too good a hand for me. 6♥. Alone in the dark...

Would it be a good idea to delay seeing of the last bid made for the two players that don't have to bid next? Here is an example: Step 1: Partner deals, and opens 1H. The bid is visible only to my RHO, and I don't know which one of them is thinking. Step 2: Let's say LHO passes. Now I see both bids at once, but I don't know who thought for how long. At this point LHO sees only partner's opening, and doesn't know who thought at the opening, and who thinks now, I or RHO. Step 3: As soon as I make my bid LHO sees simultaniously the last two bids, but partner sees only my RHO's pass. And so on. The drawbacks: 1. The interface should behave differently for the players and the TD(kibitzers). I can only guess how much hassle it would be to implement it. 2. You don't know who slows the bidding, and can't complain from a particular player, only can call the TD. Because of this a playing TD would be unable to replace a player, since he wouldn't know who to replace. But then again, a playing TD isn't able to properly view these situations anyway. He can only trust to what is shouted in the tournament's chat.

No.. the page has javascript testing specifically for navigator. If the answer to that test is true, then you get the error message. So what Opera presents itself as is not navigator..... :-) Oh, come on... Humiliating me once was not enough? ;)

Ben is quite right. I was too lazy and/or gullible. It works not only in Firefox, but Konqueror and Opera too. It doesn't even show the message in Opera. I guess Opera presents itself as IE. It's safe to get rid of the error message.

Please update your announcement if you make it compatible with Firefox :)

2♥. I support extremely rarely with 3 cards, and it almost always leads to a disaster, but I believe it is the best bid here because of the two top honors in hearts, because the shorter trump will stop their diamonds, and because I compensate both with points and controls the lack of the fourth trump. If I ever saw a hand suggesting playing with a Moysian fit, this is it. Petko

That reminds me of "Third hand thinks". An actual quote (from Danny Roth, if I'm not mistaken).