Gilithin

Good grief, that was less funny than most of the Trump sketches. The canned laughter doesn't exactly help its cause.

Are you suggesting that if a player stated to the table: "Sorry, I wasn't concentrating, I meant to bid 3♣" that this would not be UI? In a no-undo tournament, these things are more or less relatable.

The problem somes less often from the misclick or "misclick" itself and more often from the player announcing to the table something that they should not. In this respect, I think "directly at fault" is more than obvious.

"Are you offering?"

Are you clear about what happened Ken? It seems to me that the case rests on the answers to a small number of subjective questions and it is not at all clear to me that the answers I would give are the right ones for a wider society. Would you find him guilty of the most serious charges, or the lesser charges, or none at all? Or are you split according on the specific encounter? Honestly, it's a complex case with multiple attacks and shootings to consider as well as incredibly long jury instructions. I would have been more worried if they had come back almost immediately. The time taken suggests quite strongly that they are taking the job seriously.

If you tell me that Fargon (presumably a typo for Fagron?) Simple Syrup and Ora-Sweet Syrup are precisely the same thing I will believe you. On the surface though, these sound like different products.

It is a funny term, primarily because it comes from the efforts of a German, Kurt Lewin, to convert subjective aspects of psychology into mathematical forms. As he was writing in German, he used the word Valenz for the value of an object at a given standpoint. Since this paper turned out to be highly influential, it was naturally translated into English and Valenz was translated literally to valence. Thus translated, the term became used across many areas, most typically (but not exclusively) associated with the mathematical representation of emotional responses. It is quite an interesting field but one probably best left to the real experts in this area. Unfortunately there are plenty of hacks along for the ride who conduct bad faith experiments to produce a pre-designed outcome, usually with the hope of gaining attention and/or funding. Separating out the good from the bad research is an art most PhD students learn in the first year of research while doing their paper review.

It means you show a subject lots of "nice" images - relaxed family gatherings, cute animals, smiling faces, etc - and "bad" images (violence, pollution, disasters, etc) and see how they react to them. The former category are the positively-valenced images. In normal parlance, it just means good or bad.

If this really were the reason you lose constantly, the answer would be easy - stop taking high doses of drugs before playing! I looked at the link but already on page 1 I have enough issues with the paper that I wonder it got past peer-review. First the study says it is double-blind but the doses are provided with different flavourings, meaning that the tester has an easy means of discovering whether a subject is active or control, thus negating one of the points of this. Then they report that from the active group, 46.6% correctly guessed their state and conclude that this is not significant from 50%. But this is disingenuous. You would not expect a 50%-0%-50% distribution and using that as your null hypothesis is just wrong. Rather, people who are extremely impaired through the drug, or know the effects and can recognise them, will choose "yes", those with little to no noticeable effect will choose "no" and those with some effects, or who just prefer not to state a preference, will choose "don't know". Now they do not mention the "don't know" portion for the active group but for the control it is 41% so presumably it is fairly high. If the figure was also 41% for the active group, this would leave only 12.4% saying "no" - 46.6 : 12.4 sounds rather significant to me. Which brings me to the next issue. When I started writing this, I thought I would quickly check for the actual "don't know" figure in the active group of Study 1. So where is it? I cannot ever remembering reading a peer-reviewed paper like this that reported on data and just did not publish that data at all in any form. Quite often they hide the specifics of the data - that's a major issue in certain fields - but just not showing it at all? What this looks like to me is that someone has a hypothesis and rather than trying to design the best possible trial, instead tried to design the trial with the best chance of "proving" the hypothesis. And they did not even manage that for every trial - hidden away towards the end, one of the trials has a 61.2% "yes" response in the active group. 61.2% for Option 1 in a 3-option trial! Yet that result gets no commentary at all, while 2 other observations get entire paragraphs! Funnily enough though, in trying to pass off the results of this trial as not so relevant, the researchers rather give the game away as to what happened. "(in subject did not guess condition)". Only 1 from 215. The real conclusion then - if you get rid of the "don't know" response, subjects are very likely to notice their impaired state to a significant degree. To some extent, I feel like the real theme of this paper should be: "we tried to cook the numbers but we managed to find out something interesting anyway". Study 3 has, I think, a second interesting point buried within it. The researchers point out that the number of balloons was significantly lower in this trial than the other 2. What they do not mention is why - basically the trial was stopped halfway through for subjects to answer questions, and then continuing for the second half. What does that mean? Well it breaks the rhythm, thus reducing the number of balloons popped in a given time. But it is a little more than that. If I were a researcher in this field and I read this paper, my immediate reaction would be to wonder if taking a short break every X minutes might be a way of reducing the impact of acetaminophen when doing generally monotonous tasks. Rather than research of the generic "drugs are bad and we can prove it" type, this sort of trial could actually produce recommendations on best procedures for those that need to take the drug. But is there funding in that? Most academic research is only done to get funding for a department to do more academic research. If there is money in it someone will probably do this; if not, noone will care.

I think you are seriously underestimating the American people here. One of the core reasons why so many Americans have migrated to the extremes is specifically because that is what FPTP supports. If the electoral system used a proportional method and there were 5 or 6 credible alternatives, I am sure you would see moderates being fully represented and parties working together to govern the country. Seeing leaders working together in turn helps the electorate to see (some of the) other parties not as the enemy but more as potentially friendly rivals. It is good both for democracy (more choice, closer representation of the electorate in elected officials) and for the wider society. Or to put it another way, if your friend was put in a real life Trolley Problem scenario, would you blame them for the resulting death(s) or would you assign blame to the person/people that created the situation?

Did you similarly focus on the cost when it came to the 2017 tax cuts? Given the choice between spending $2.3t on tax breaks for the top 10% and $2.3t on modernising an obsolete national infrastructure, which do you think provides the most benefit to the country? If the inflation does turn out to be structural, take some cash out of the system from the top. That is the right way to do trickle-down economics - put cash in at the bottom, take it out from the top. America has for far too long been doing the reverse.

In a Precision context, when you have that hand for a 2♦ overcall Responder can more or less envision an 11-15hcp (14)35 hand opposite, which is usually precise enough to make a good decision. And when Responder happens to be weak, you are really going to miss the difference between (1♣) - 1♦ and (1♦) - 2♦! The situation is somewhat different when Opener is unlimited, which was the main point being made. I quite like (1♦) - 2♥ to be limited range Michaels/Roman even after a natural 1♦ opening, so count me in on this one. :) The point being made was similar to the one above, the limited openings make handling competitive auctions somewhat easier. That is admittedly less true compared to systems where 1♦ is always unbalanced, or 5+/(4441), than for Standard. But that is just another reason to play 1♣ as natural or balanced. I would say that 2♣ is a weakness in traditional Precision (5♣4M or 6+♣) but something of a 2-edged sword in Modern Precision (6+♣) and even a slight strength in AUC (6+♣no4M). Bidding 2♣ on the first round with tight strength limits and 6+♣ often enough makes life difficult for the opps as (nearly) to offset the lack of space when Responder has a big hand. I think the specific range can make a big difference here - 10-15 is (imho) too wide, particularly when 2♣ can be 5♣4M, but 11-14 and 6+♣ is not really a weakness at all. We do. That is probably the main thing to take away from the previous post. The rest is really just my quibbling on the difference between a nebulous limited 1♦ opening and a nebulous unlimited 1♦ opening. As you have already pointed out, the unlimited system pretty much ends up with all of the disadvantages and few, if any, advantages.

Are you sure about this? The limited, nebulous 1♦ opening often causes at least as many issues for the opponents as the Precision pair and often results in them finding their LoTT limit quickly while the opponents are left to guess whether to compete or not. Most big club players that I have heard to express themselves on this, admittedly not a majority, seem to think that the 1♣ opening is the weakest part of Modern Precision. Arguably the true weak spot in the system is actually when you hold a Weak 2♦ and are unable to bid it. I think it goes beyond this. The reason why the nebulous Precision 1♦ opener is effective is because of its tight strength limits. Getting to 2M quickly on a 4-4 fit will often be a win and both players can know that game is out of reach. Where 1♦ is unlimited, suddenly the issues created are going to hit us a much higher proportion of the time and the opponents less often. Within a natural context I just do not understand the point of moving hands up to 1♦ from 1♣. From a purely theoretical perspective, you want your 1♣ opening to hold about 38% of hands and the 1♦ opening to be around 24%. The traditional, natural 1♣ openers do not come close to this, which explains to some extent why the trend has been to move to, for example, "1♣ = natural or balanced"-type structures. But reducing the load of a natural 1♣ opening? Seriously, why?!?

I think this highlights one of the big things wrong with the US political system. The government signed a Bill into law. This is somehow seen as such a massive achievement that it becomes a major media event. Other governments around the world manage new laws on a regularly basis. Most of those governments involve multiple parties working together. And Americans then wonder why voters are so critical of their political leaders. It should be a normal thing for the government to do something positive for the country on a regular basis, not seen as something special that happens once every 4 years or so!

The last information I saw was recommending a booster for anyone in the right categories over 40.

What is the difference in Italy between an immediate 4NT and 2♠ followed by 4NT? And what do you use a direct 4♠ for if not range ask Baron?

There are a number of equality issues. A tech worker might make 5 times the salary of a fast food worker but the senior management of that tech company will make 30-50 times what the tech worker does. There is also the factor of generational inequality. Boomers got the benefits of the property boom together with highly favourable financial conditions provided by governments. Because of this, most cities have a small group of investors, the vast majority of which are either Boomers or their descendants who inherited the benefits, who control a large proportion of the housing supply. These are the people that have bought up the market at least as much as those professional C1s and C2s. And that is before we get on to the inequalities of race, gender and location. As far as inflation goes, it has been mentioned to me a few times by people who know about these things that inflation of about 2% is not really a bad thing for an economy. The problem for the US is that the current numbers seem to suggest a figure well above that. That would be ok if it were a transitory phase after the covid lockdowns but there is some evidence to suggest that this runs considerably deeper than that. It would be nice to think that the results of such inflationary pressures would be a reduction in inequality but somehow I seriously doubt that is actually what is happening here. Rather the poor will probably end up more or less where they are (higher wages, higher costs) while the rich will just increase the gap (negligibly higher costs and a considerably better investment environment).

You should at least consider it, 1NT - 2NT as a natural invite is significantly less efficient than most reasonable alternatives. You do not even give up more information using 2♠ as a range ask, so you are essentially saying that the risk of a lead-directing double here is worth the crippling of your bidding system.

Which software were they using then? On BBO the TD gets informed who has called them to the best of my knowledge. They then usually ask the player privately what the issue is and take it from there. A "no undo" tournament is essentially the same as the TD ruling that there was no mistaken call and it was in fact a change of mind, due to the propensity of some players to use undos for rethinks rather than actual misclicks. Rulings would presumably then follow from that basis.

Since this is an online tournament, there is no reason for ChCh to have been privy to the private messages passed between RR and the TD. SO how exactly did he obtain the information that a 3♣ opening was intended. If there is some off-platform communication taking place between the partners, this would obviously be a grave matter indeed and I know just the Norwegian to look into it and pass judgement.

I guess the majority of posters here play systems where a 3433 hand uses a 2♣ response in some strength range. It is possible that you respond 2NT with this, or use a specialised sequence in your FNT structure, but it does not seem to me to be particularly controversial to think that 1♠ - 2♣ might be a 3 card suit a small portion of the time. This is something of a systemic issue. It is quite popular in parts of Europe to play that a direct 3m raise show extras and that with a minimum you first bid 2M and then show the minor support as a second rebid if the auction allows. This gives better strength resolution but poorer shape resolution. If that is the system in use, there is no reason for Responder to downgrade the club support based on it being a second rebid rather than a direct raise.

Do we have any reason to think this was run under ACBL supervision? Even if it were, I assume such calls are essentially self-alerting and so defenders would get some sort of explanation in the Clarification Period even if they chose not to ask beforehand. Or is delayed disclosure also not part of the ACBL regulations?

That is precisely the point I made, so I guess it was you who missed it.

Valar morghulis.

A couple of your points have existing solutions: - You can turn off sounds for everything except "Your Turn" (shuffle, card played, chat, invite, new round, TD call) under account settings. - With an unresponsive player you can send them a private message. Finally, not paying attention to the game is a breach of the rules. Do you think the rules do not apply to you just because you are playing virtually and easily distracted?