geller

People in every country seem happy to support their national teams in football (soccer), basketball, ice hockey,..... No reason bridge should be any different, even though the absolute number of fans may be several orders of magnitude smaller. I would think that BBO vugraph broadcasts of WBF championship events would be one of the cheapest and most cost-effective ways for the WBF to promote the game of bridge world-wide, and I wish they would be a bit more pro-active. At the moment there may or may not be prospects for sponsorship, but if the audience could be grown by broadcasting world-wide this certainly wouldn't hurt future prospects for sponsorship, and would contribute generally to promoting bridge. Ceratinly the costs are non-zero, but are not so big in relation to the costs of staging the World Championships. The question of whether or not a vu-graph coordinator should be invited to Estoril at WBF expense is a subset of the question of how much effort the WBF should be devoting to promoting VuGraph, and the big question should be resolved first. In a positive way, I hope.

In all of the example auctions cited above on this page the opponents were silent. If the opponents never bid the best system is probably precision, or something like that. But what happens when you open 1♣ (16+, any) and next hand bids 4♠? Now you'd better have pretty good judgment! I don't really think you can decide which system is "best" (a pretty silly argument anyway in view of all the different systems that have been used over the years by champions) anyway. What seems more important is, whatever system you do use, to have well-worked out agreements with your partner about as many sequences (especially competitive ones) as possible.

The Laws were originally written for rubber bridge, where there is no Director, so it was presumably believed that the revoke penalty would restore equity on average. In Duplicate there is a Director and a Committee, so each individual revoke could be treated by adjudicating to restore equity, but presumably the lawmakers feel that there should be some penalty for revokes inasmuch as they disrupt the game, so in addition to restoring equity people should be punished for not paying attention. (It is less clear why the non-offending side should get a bonus in excess of equity......) If there were no revoke penalties there would be much less incentive not to revoke and directors and committees would beeven busier than they are now having to adjudicate each case. So the present system of revoke penalties seems like a reasonable "practical compromise."

Daily bulletin #10 says the results of the semis wer still tentative due to the appeal, which still had not decided as the bulletiin went to press http://web2.acbl.org/nabcbulletins/2005summer/db11.pdf And Daily Bulletin 11 (the last one) is just a 4 page bulletin with some results of events (photos of the winners of the Spingold) and not much else. http://web2.acbl.org/nabcbulletins/2005summer/db10.pdf I saw the hand on vugraph in the semis, but I have no idea about the appeal. If anyone knows the details could they please post them.

Actually the BBO translation page for Hebrew exists and it has 1400 or so of the 1627 terms/phrases translated now. So probably it's not software development but just translation that's holding things up. Or it may be that along with the translation there's also a certain amount of software development. But since Hebrew is a one byte per char language I'd imagine it shouldn't be that hard, even if it's right to left. Can anyone fill in the details on the state of this?

I am an American (joke: Q. what do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? A: Bilingual, Q. 3 languages, A: trilingual, Q:　4 or more languages? A: multilingual, Q. only one language? A: American) who's lived in Japan for 21 yrs and along the way become fluent in spoken and written Japanese, so I can see both sides of the question. First, very few people in Japan are really fluent in English, and Japanese players really appreciate having commentary in their own language . I suspect this is true in many countries Second, if each Federation has a vugraph coordinator who can arrange for the commentators in their respective languages that actually makes Roland's job easier, not harder. (Note: that person doesn't have to be from the federation, a suitable BBO member who plays internationally from that country could be fine.) At least for the moment I seem to have become the defacto vugraph arranger for Japanese language broadcasts. Third, I agree completely with Roland that languages should not be mixed in one commentary stream. This would drive everyone nuts except maybe completely bilingual people. Fourth, right now the commentary is made with chat. Perhaps Fred could upgrade the vugraph chat to function in the same logical way (obviously the implementation is completely different) as SAP (second audio program) where you push a button to select English or Spanish commentary on a baseball game (in the US), or English and Japanese in Japan (for US baseball games shown here). Except that for BBO there should be as many languages as possible, depending on the importance of the event. For example, in the last playoff for the 3rd berth in the Bermuda Bowl from Zone 6, Japan was playing Indonesia. We had English commentary at one table and Japanese at the other, but it would have been nice if we'd also had the facility to offer commentary in Bahasa Indonesia (the national language of Indonesia). And perhaps to have all 3 languages at both tables, provided the Japanese and Indonesian Federations could arrange the commentators. In order for this to work Fred and Uday would have to upgrade the software to provide a special facility so the vugraph audience could click on the language of the choice (from the available languages) and also the commentators could click on the language they were commenting on. In my case I mostly did Japanese commentary of the PABF, but every so often I dropped in on the English commentary in the other room to inform the audience about the foibles of the Japanese players. This would probably be fun for all the specs at other events as well. The finals of the soccer World Cup are broadcast to the whole world in over 100 languages. Maybe some day the same can happen on BBO for the finals of the Olympiad or Bermuda Bowl, or at least there can be 10 or so languages. This would probably help make bridge more of a spectator sport than it is now. It was really a lot of fun watching Fred and Brad vs. Zia and Rosenberg on the hand where Zia sacrificied in 7C in the Spingold. (Congrats on the win Fred!) Anyway, as the number of broadcasts increases there will be more and more events primarily of local interest only, so it will be natural for those events to tend more and more to be broadcast in the local language only, I would guess.

An analogy to soccer seems more relevant than discussion of legal matters. If a player commits a serious foul he will be sent off (shown the red card) by the referee, and his team must play on a man short. The committee in Tenerife was essentially playing the role of a referee. The referre's decision is final. This is what happened at Tenerife. B-L were tossed out of the event they were playing in. Full stop. On the other hand, a player sent off once for an extremely grave foul, or with a history of many fouls, can be punished further by the disciplinary authorities of his country (or FIFA or UEFA) with a suspension or even expulsion for the game. A famous example is Eric Cantona of Manchester United, who charged into the stands and assaulted a spectator. The disciplinary authorities of bridge (WBF, for example, or the European federation) have not yet, to my knowledge, taken any disciplinary action against B-L. Presumably they have the right to do so, but there must be some hearing where B-L could be represented by counsel, cross-examine witnesses, and presumably appeal to the sports arbitrartion court in Lausanne if hypothetically they were dissatisfied with the verdict. I think the criticism of the committee in Tenerife (that they didn't function as a court) is not valid, inasmuch their decision was limited to the event in question and had to be arrived at quickly duriing an ongoing event.

Brings to mind the old expression, "as honest as a cashier with the boss watching." :unsure:

I don't know anything except what I've read, but it certainly appears B-L had (whether deservedly or not) a less than sterling reputation developed over a period of several years. In view of this, why weren't they regularly videotaped by a setup like the "eye in the sky" at casinos? Or perhaps was this actually done, but just not announced? Does anyone know?

If the full hand instead had been [hv=n=sxxxxhxxxdxxxxxcx&w=sakjhkqtxxdxcqjxx&e=shjxxdkqj9xctxxxx&s=sqxxxxxhaxdaxcakx]399|300|[/hv] ♣ then presumably West makes a FAST double, so East can pass and collect 300 rather than bid 5♣ and go for 500. Scientific bidding!

For what it's worth, here's the actual hand. [hv=d=s&v=e&n=sq765ht43dt763c42&w=st2hakq652d5cakj8&e=shj98dkqj84ct7653&s=sakj9843h7da92cq9]399|300|Scoring: IMP[/hv]

I agree with everyone who thinks 4♦ is a terrible choice. But this is what the actual East actually bid at the table. The question is then whether or not pass is a logical alternative to 5♣ after East's 2nd double. It appears to me from the above that the answer is yes.

Thanks for all the replies. As you might have guessed this problem arose from a slow double by West at his second turn. It appears that there are three votes for 5♣ and two for pass, i.e. this is a small sample but it is NOT the case that 75% of the sample of those of you who were kind enough to answer support pulling the double. This suggests pass is a LA. But the sample here is too small to be definitive, and may not be comparable to the sample of players in Japan. Once again, thanks to all.

Here's a hand from a natl tourney in Japan IMPs, You're East, and you hold ♠-- ♥J98 ♦ KQJ84 ♣T7653 You're vul, the oppts are non-vul. The bidding goes as follows South West North East 1♠ DBL 3♠ 4♦ 4♠ DBL Pass ? What call do you make?

I doubt it, because the BBO vugraph can handle just about any hands file format provided that BBO is given a sample of the format in advance. If you look here you can see the organizers are having big internet connectivity problems. http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?sho...t=0entry63404

As a wise man once said, "It is very dangerous NOT to raise partner with a fit," and this hand seems to confirm that. The risk/reward ratio for North to raise to 3 hearts with almost perfect cards (only the queen of diamonds is wasted) appears to strongly favor the raise over the pass.

In most (if not all) of the rest of the world outside ACBL land, including WBF championships, defenders may not ask their partner "having none?" (although dummy may ask declarer). It's unfortunate that the ACBL insists on having separate rules than the rest of the world, but that's what has happened.

iirc (probably not, as it's over 30 yrs ago) the "PLOB" call of 2D being criticized by MSC moderator Moyse was a call made by panelist John Swanson. Can anyone either confirm or correct this?

IIRC, "PLOB" was the critical name ascribed to NMF by Sonny Moyse, the former editor (till 67) of TBW and then MSC moderator. It's not really right to ascribe 2/1 solely to Walsh and his colleagues. It was a logical evolution from Al Roth's Roth-Stone and also Kaplan-Sheinwold, both of which used 1NT as a 1 round force and 2/1 as GF or almost FG. This was recognized by the fact this system was called "five card majors western style" in an early edition of Max Hardy's book. Of course it certainly is true that Walsh and his associates had a major influence on the evolution of 2/1. In my case I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 60s (majoring in bridge, and occasionally studying geophysics) and Hal Kandler (who was part of the "Walsh crowd") helped me get started on 2/1. (I had already played K/S as a high school student in NYC.) So I think any article on this stuff should make clear that these systems evolved in a natural way based on the contributions of many many people over a fairly long period of time.

If you go to lExplore Bridge --> ibrary --> Chinese you can find a Chinese version of the site rules. Maybe you can check if these display correctly or not and tell Fred.