TrialBid

Sounds like an excellent idea. BBO developers, while you are at it, please find a way to give us the experience we have not had since the DOS version went away: for a period of time after the tournament ended, it was possible for everyone who participated to chat the tournament just ended. That provided a tournament afterglow that, especially if we did well, we could share some of our experiences. It has felt like a significant loss ever since that feature disappeared.

This thread reminds me of a very real problem tha BBO still to the best of my knowledge does not support in the software and it has nothing to do with relative merits of players or their motives. Suppose a pair is having a blockbuster set and encounter UI exchanged that really cannot allow play to continue and the director rules A+ for the nonoffending side. Here is the problem: if that side is having a 72 percent game then receiving A+ will *lower* their. ACBL tournament directors do not automatically adjust A+ to their 72 percent average but they understand the concept and will make the adjustment if asked to. BBO has many directors who do not have that level of experience nor do that many players actually know to ask for that adjustment when it would help them. Thus I think it would be a great service to fairness to build that into BBO's score processing.

This was a TERRIFIC suggestion and it is still a problem. Bit us today when we were trying to swap out a pair.

The hand in question How often has this sort of thing occurred? Any thoughts on what is going on?

I saw the topic and first thought it might be an issue that I keep running into. Because the list of tournaments is constantly jumping about, more than once I have played the wrong tournament because I said join and the payment prompt does not identify the tournament as it does for all other tournaments. Perhaps that idea needs to get its own thread. IDK.

It's the arbitrary 5-tricks-to-go cutoff that really can produce a really unhappy outcome now and again. It seems to me that a few heuristics could improve the situation a lot. 1. If the contract is already made (or defeated) with the tricks taken already (plus certain trump tricks in a trump contract) that is a good place to start. For the side going plus, that score or A+ should be used with the reciprocal score (or A-) for the other side. 2. If a good claim preceded timing out, the Robots should accept it, no matter how many tricks remain. There are times, however, when I think BBO prefers to leave unpleasantness in games we don't pay for.

Well... I offer this email reply to me from Jacki in 2014: Does that not count as a client reporting a bug? Methinks it just fell through the cracks.

This is a policy I have long been aware of. However, there is "hole"--in ACBL at least--as of the last time I checked. Until the ACBL director manually marks the sub as permanent it doesn't matter how many boards the sub plays. I once came in during board 1 and when the player returned in the last round, I was shut out and the original player was given the points. Has this been fixed yet??

For the first time, I was rejected for a tournament for having too low a completion rate. It says my percentage is 83. There is something bogus going on here. I basically never quit tournaments but I do substitute often in ACBL and am frequently dismissed when the original player returns. It's also possible that BBO doesn't keep an accurate history going back a considerable time but only look at the time period that Bridgebase keeps current tournament records. That would be a serious problem when I have (as is true currently) been online very irregularly and have logged very little history. At any rate, I say BBO is doing it in a way that blocks people who should not be blocked. I'd like to know why and I'd like to see it fixed.

I did. No change.

Playing Bridge Bingo, I had my LH Robot stick with 9 minutes to go. It never bid and time finally ran out. The notion of booting a robot that is a required part of the game is novel but not very useful I'm afraid.

That's discouraging to hear that the free demonstration application is more robust and reliable than what we may be paying for.

It may be coincidence but shortly after I began using the Flash beta client, disconnects have become rampant and in all versions. In the Flash clients my connection always shows as excellent. A steady ping to bridgebase.com shows a packet loss rate of about 0.1 percent--right through disconnects, too. Other online gaming sites seem completely unaffected. Bridge Base Online may not be having a generic problem, but neither is there any detectable problem on my end. What's next? Updated information: the "Just Play Bridge" option for Bridge Base is solid for hours at a time. Occasionally I'll see a connection trouble announcement, but it is resolved in seconds without disruption.

Well, that's a rather narrow view of mischief. If the data stream is clear text, it makes it comparatively easier to build an assistant that can keep track of and display all the cards played and fill in exact cards unseen when the suits and hand are counted out. Surely it's clear how that would be an advantage in playing speed games for BB$, for example. BTW, something has changed between my original post and today. Now I do see news or scores come up in the frame window without having to "Open in new window" while using MS Edge. Anyone have a clue why it's different now?

The Flash app is loaded via http. Can you state for sure that Flash itself is also communicating by http? Actually I would hope not because that would make mischief at the user's end easier via intercepting unencoded hand information.

When I get any browser-rendered pop-up from the Flash version (for news or scores, etc.) until I "Open in new window" I get an empty window. As far as I can tell, the reason for it is that MS Edge cannot (unless by registry manipulation IDK) be forced to display mixed content. BBO Developers, I think that this means you need make https links for this to be seamless. The workaround for now is to avoid Edge, but I, for one, actually like the clean look and good performance of Edge and I haven't ever been an MS browser fan.

For this topic to even come up suggests to me that too many people have been playing online bridge for too long and have forgot what was considered general knowledge. Point 1: You are not "varying" understandings because of an irregularity. You merely have agreements covering what to do in competitive situations which may be quite different from what you do uncontested. Moreover a sensible reading of the rules on insufficient bids makes it obvious that condoning an insufficient (or a bid out of turn) supersedes any irregularity as the instruction is that the auction proceeds without penalty (including any possible UI). Point 2: Expert agreements have existed since long before I even played bridge covering some auctions. One I can cite from a book I own, Robert Ewen's Doubles. A double of an insufficient bid is unilaterally a penalty double. Period. It does not matter that if it were not insufficient it would have been negative. If the opponent has entered the auction unwisely, do not give him a chance to pass and bar his partner from an auction they shouldn't have entered!

I've been using a new Chromebook for a month or so and using BBO is unreliable. For a varying amount of time after login, all is well. Then some action (any action seems eligible: play a card, bid, chat, claim) stops all action dead in the water for up to a minute or so. It's nerve-wracking during play because if I click a second time on the card I tried to play, when action resumes, (if the card I led won the trick) I've now led the card next to it. Once the problem occurs it recurs soon. I haven't tested to see if it will eventually never respond, because the initial delay is already enough to make it virtually unusable. What I normally do is open another window and log in again. If I had to guess, something is consuming resources and not releasing them until logoff. Awhile back something afflicted Chrome on other systems but from the threads I've read, that's resolved. If possible I'd like to see this fixed because the Chromebook is a nice travel companion, but until it is, I'll just play on my "real" computers.

Whether it stems from the same cause, I cannot be sure, but I was just booted without fault in an automated game: It took me a few seconds to count tricks and claim 9 tricks. That, to me, is an action taken within the 30-second interval. Apparently the clock is neither reset nor stopped during a claim. At what must have been the 29-second point of the original countdown, opponent(s) rejected the claim and I was booted from the tournament. Exceedingly annoying, I must say, and hardly a way to reward the TCR80% folks: Play the tourney! Get your TCR downgraded! Oh, boy!

I believe I can offer some additional information. What I looked at and reported was the tournament result as shown in the Web client as reflected after the tournament completed. Perhaps I should have taken a screen shot, but what apparently happened was that the second adjustment caused what was displayed for me to show as Ave and my score for the tourney to show as 63.89. In other words, the result stored in MyHands (which is correct) was out of sync with the tournament results displayed in real-time (what I saw). By the way, what Rain was saying--that trick 8 has to be complete--is obviously untrue. What is the actual requirement?

GIB is the agent that does the adjustment--or at least is used to do the adjustment in automated tournaments and, as I understand it, MB$ hands. Why is that NOT a GIB bug and/or issue?

When I discussed this with Rain, I seemed to have seen something that doesn't fit what he thinks is supposed to happen. In the Geo USA my partner played this to trick 8 (in progress) when time ran out. After a short delay, the software announced an adjustment to -300 for declarer. At that point my score for the set was 65%. Moments later the score reverted to Ave and my score for the set dropped to 63.9%. While there's a lot of opportunity for abusing the system in these games by preventing getting the play through trick 8, my issue is that it is clearly a bug to tantalize me with an adjustment in my favor and then revoke it. http://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?myhand=M-1894958-1296176701

When tournament completion rate and board completion rate first appeared, I noted that my tournament completion rate was 100% and board completion rate was 99%. Somewhat later I saw that my tournament completion rate was 97%. A few days later it was 95%. I asked Uday what was going on. Apparently there's a daily batch crunch of the portfolio of hands and tournaments for the approximately 30 days of tournaments that are online. Not only is that a lot of data manipulation it produces strange anomalies that will occasionally nail the most scrupulous of BBO'ers. Consider this scenario: MrEverready spends 5 weeks exploring the Kalahari desert. While playing the first tournament since returning, the power goes out. When order is restored, he wants to try out Geo USA for the first time. No can do. His completion rate is 0%. OK, I'm being extreme here. But a similar less dramatic fiction arose in my numbers. I needed to leave one Automated tourney (which I did via the withdrawal/replacement mechanism). Even though I had missed exactly one tournament which was receding into the past, my tournament completion rate kept dropping. Why? Because over the holidays I had fewer partners to play with and I got addicted to the bonus on Robot Rebate 55%. That just doesn't make sense. But there's an easier way, one that never lies and can be kept updated in real time: Store the best available proxy for completion rate for a player. For me, say, 98%. When ANY tournament is completed, add one to the completion rate if it isn't already 100. When a FREE tournament, with a HUMAN director, is exited prior to completion, decrement the completion rate, if it is above 0. (Yes, I'm assuming that paying to play should give you the right to forfeit your entry as a sufficient punishment. Further proof is that there are plenty of subs ready to try to earn BBO points for free.) A similar issue arises with the board completion rate, one that showed up for me because I rarely play in the Main Club. But because of the data window, I did have data, but now I do not. That, too, seems silly and could be addressed by a similar strategy.

Perhaps Fred will read this. I have two different e-mail replies from him, the first from September '06 and the second from June '08, committing to implement "Human declares if not defending." The change this would require seems totally trivial.

No need to be sarcastic. People have every right to expect systems to behave in ways that seem easiest for them. As a programmer I was constantly aware of how a poor choice I made once would be inflicted on users thousands (in BBO many millions) of times. There are really multiple issues here: There is (1) the protective response when you try to surf out of the page where Flash BBO is running and (2) the prompt that appears when you explicitly click the Log off button. What I've seen suggests that (1) does NOT happen in Chrome, but does in Firefox and IE. It's OK with me if that's considered a bug (in Chrome or Flash or BBO) and gets fixed. Others might have another viewpoint. However, when I explicitly click Log off I think my order should be immediately carried out. For crying out loud, the whole purpose of the Flash client was to make logging in a quick and easy operation. It's simply not a big deal to be returned to the login screen. If it's made a user-controllable option (even under the Advanced tab) that's OK, too, but I want no prompt.