Kemistry

Really BBO should have an iPhone app and an Android app. Just making the existing interface small would not make a great interface. The phone and tablet devices really are different than desktop and laptop devices: no keyboard, no mouse, but touch screen, gestures, tilt sense, and in general smaller screens. This calls for a different implementation for a comfortable user experience. It would be nice if BBO either implemented apps, or allowed an independent party to write and sell apps.

Those are the types of guesses I had been making as well, but remember that BBO is international, and ACBL is just one country. I also wonder what the ACBL portion is of hands played worldwide.

I'm not sure why there can't be a club set up that requires some number of BBO master points to enter. Seems like this would be similar to a Life Master pairs event, where there's a minimum criteria to play. This would not guarantee the club would be filled with friendly people, but at least it would filter out a lot of beginners. And if it's an opt in club, it could be a place for experienced players to go find a pickup game and hope for a higher level of play. My experience in the Main Bridge Club is that the players with numbers by their names tend to know their systems and are more responsive. The people who don't know bridge very well, or are away from the game a lot, tend not to have these marks. It seems like it would be easy to sue this as a filter for a specific club. "Find me a seat in the BBO 3+ Club" would probably be pretty popular. And if people don't have those master points, it might encourage them to run some tournaments to get the credentials needed to play there.

How many hands are played per year on BBO? How is this changing over time? How many hands were played in clubs and tournaments for the same years? It seems like I often see 6000 or 10,000 people logged into BBO, and I imagine there are many more than that sitting at tables in clubs or tournaments. But is 1% of all bridge being played online now? 10%? Is anyone tracking statistics of both online and face-to-face? It seems like relevant information for long term promotion of bridge. Thanks, Rick

I also play a lot of World of Warcraft, which is very public about player achievements (i.e., open web site to query/view anyone), and very private about time played. They provide lots of detail about your own time played, but no way to see that for anyone else. The master point display in BBO seems like a similar achievement, and the number of logins seems a lot like the hours played. It seems like logins should be an optional display, probably opt in, since lots of users are technically unsavvy.