pilowsky

When I joined the Prime club I was told that: We will improve the BBO Prime community and keep adding more awesome features to your subscription. Don't hesitate to let us know what else you would love to see on BBO in general, or in the BBO Prime community in particular. Here are Some improvements that I would really like to see. 1. The ability to use deal sources other than "Random or Vugraph". I have worked out how to make all sorts of different hand types easily and import them into BBO for bidding practice. If anyone is interested I can provide a presentation showing them how to do this. No specialist computer skills are needed. Like most other Prime members I pay to use this area for practice, not to socialise. I would like to be able to import these prepared hands and practice with them since I have already paid for the Advanced robots, I do not want to go to a teaching table and rent robots there. 2. As mentioned in an earlier thread I really want to be able to toggle the option to play the hand when my partner is Declarer. But not always. I can understand that in the first iteration of Prime it was different because most of the membership was not paying. This is not the case any more. The free Prime tournament is nice but not as valuable to me as the 2 requests above. Perhaps other Prime members could also make suggestions. Normally when I write to "support" I am told to post on the Forum. So, here it is. Changes of this type would help me enormously. They should not be difficult to implement. What do other Prime members think? I have set the poll

Ok, here's my inexpert guess. They're playing Precision. 1♦ shows 11+ not necessarily much to do with diamonds. The hand looks (something) like this: [hv=pc=n&s=sat87642hq42dk9ca&w=skqht9daqt86ct853&n=sj95ha873dckj9764&e=s3hkj65dj75432cq2&d=w&v=b&b=4&a=1dd1nd2d3c3d4s5d5sp6sppp]399|300[/hv] West bangs down the ♦Ace, but the contract makes on any lead. At least this layout does .

Hilarious, You must have lived a very cloistered life. Although it is true that 10% of the population is really clever. This, of course, means that at the other end of the normal distribution people can have some incredibly strange ideas. And they believe them very strongly. It used to be a 'thing' when I was a child to send your children to the home of someone infected with measles or mumps. The idea was if they caught it when they were young it was less of a problem. I suspect that something similar may be happening here. Unfortunately, COVID19 is completely different. As I noted earlier many young people in the United States already have severe co-morbidities. Here is a link to the CDC data showing that more than 20% of US youth is obese. For a long time, this was politicised and there was talk of 'fat-shaming'. Unfortunately, Post-modernism will not improve your oxygen-carrying capacity when a virus destroys your lungs. Being obese means that your body has a lot more work to do to get oxygen to the tissues. Your fitness is low and you will probably have diabetes and hypertension. It's like smoking, but heavier. Coupled with the USA being a failed state where 27.5 million citizens have no health insurance and for most of the others having health cover is dependent on being employed, this means that most US citizens are indentured slaves to their employers. No wonder they all want to go back to work even at risk of catching a potentially lethal disease. So, combine a lack of competency in understanding the problem with economic frailty and social insecurity, is it surprising that the USA is in the situation it finds itself in now? Normal 1st world countries provide free healthcare to their citizens. This is a social contract that is anathema to the USA. There is no point in being puzzled, there are structural problems with the US as it is currently constituted that prevent it from operating as a normal adult society where the weakest, poorest and neediest are cared for, nurtured and protected. Basically the "Framers" that everyone seems to love *****ed it up. The place needs a rethink. The white men that wrote the constitution were heroes for a different time and place. Not this one.

Or if you are the sort of person that prefers pictures it looks like this. Unless you are playing Goulash or Best Hand tournaments where you could get really strange hands. That's a "blue moon" on the right - they come up less than .02% of the time. The data comes from the ACBL and from 'playbridge' I would be very surprised if other sources were any different. Except for the different colours and shapes, Bridge is basically a sudoku problem combined with the four colour theorem.

This comment does not satisfactorily answer the issue raised. Can I ask if you are responding as a Forum member, a Player, or as a member of BBO staff? Here is an extract from the BBO statement about Prime: It is very clear that they are committing to ADDING AWESOME FEATURES. Not to fobbing me off with platitudes. I am the customer. It is not for you to tell me what benefit I get. Contact Us Feedback is welcome as usual. Use the "Contact Us" form in the BBO Prime menu, or email us at support@bridgebase.com with comments and suggestionsWe will improve the BBO Prime community and keep adding more awesome features to your subscription. Don't hesitate to let us know what else you would love to see on BBO in general, or in the BBO Prime community in particular.

This is obvious. As a member of Prime, I am paying for the right to buy a table with 3 advanced robots. Each time I do this I am playing a practice tournament against 3 robots. That is why I want to have this option. So do many other Prime clients. We all know that you don't have the option. That is why we are asking for it. Does that make the question clearer?

That's really annoying! barometer is a combination word. Or portmanteaux if you want to be a smartypants. It is derived from baro- meaning pressure and meter meaning to measure. The original meaning was to measure the pressure in the atmosphere. Since it sounds like a cool word, and because the average Joe doesn't speak Latin, it has come to mean anything that measures a fluctuation. In science, a baroreceptor still measures fluctuations in pressure, so it is confusing if you know the real meaning of the root word (that's root as in original...). FYI a barofart is 0.147 psi max. If you want to use it in a sentence. Or baroflatulence in Latin. As for compatibility, that could mean anything at all. Your system is compatible, your logins are equivalent, your playing strength is compatible. Many advanced players write 'novice' for various reasons and vice versa. The matching algorithm is no doubt as useful as the village matchmaker.

Just found this site. Looks like it does everything! http://playbridge.com/index.php Can someone show me how to take their lin files and put them into BBO so that I can use them for bidding and play practice?

Mina farföräldrar talade minst åtta olika språk. Jag pratar bara engelska i åtta olika accenter. Jag har en underbar svensk partner och Google översätta är underbart. Naturligtvis är det helt onödigt - hennes engelska är perfekt. As for the little phrase - I made it up myself .

The question of life before modern medicine is well-documented. Here is a post I made a little earlier and also put on Facebook. It includes a book/Masters thesis by a US academic concerning the influenza pandemic. The stories resonate through the decades. It is interesting to recall that during that pandemic, everything was made worse because there was no scientific evaluation of data. Statistics had not been invented. Neither had computers (or Bridge). Large ships had been invented and troops were packed into them like sardines. They were given cigarettes bad food and many contracted influenza and died as a result while their families and friends socially distanced at home. Remind you of anything? Cruise ships? At the same time, the White house Surgeon-General was recommending LETHAL doses of aspirin as a treatment for influenza (great). Which would have the added benefit of causing kidney disease and high blood pressure later on. The subsequent obesity epidemic in the United States has caused an epidemic of metabolic syndrome (AKA Syndrome X) characterised by obesity, hypertension, lipid disorders and diabetes. All of which attenuates ones ability to cope with the disastrous effects of reduced oxygen-carrying capacity associated with COVID-19. But don't worry, like a miracle, it will all go away with the heat. And some disinfectant...

I agree with everyone. Not for a second did I imagine being in a slam - before or after - I was just amazed when I saw the double-dummy and wondered if the clever people would have something up their sleeve that I didn't know about. As for clairvoyance - that would have to be psychic.

We, of course, didn't reach any of them. This came up in an online Club tournament today. As bid and played. The pbn file. What would you bid next for East? Imps scoring, Dealer West. NS vul. We play basic SAYC. [hv=pc=n&s=sq532ht95dq842c74&w=s974h43dak7cak865&n=skj86hk7dt965cj92&e=sathaqj862dj3cqt3&d=w&v=n&b=12&a=1cp1hp1np]399|300[/hv]

I agree - and I thought that I had asked for this feature before. If not I agree. After all, it seems possible everywhere else on BBO. Sometimes it is useful to be able to see how GIB plays the hand, so I would like to have it as a table option that could be toggled on or off when setting up the table in Prime. As a programmer, I know that this is easy to implement.

I understand what you are asking for. Other online Bridge services do provide this facility. One of them is Stepbridge. The server is located in the Netherlands (a small country in northern Europe with bicycles, Tulips, nice cheese and a lot of Bridge players and windmills). Stepbridge is a community club operating under the umbrella of the Australian Bridge Federation. If you join Stepbridge, you and your partner can play for $Aus2.75 / 24 board tournament (imps or matchpoints (swiss format). Australian masterpoints. All sessions are advertised 2 weeks in advance and you can book in without having to have your partner present. You can also register and a partner will be allocated. There are no robots. It is a Face-to-Face club (playing behind screens obviously) with convention cards and human players and directors. The rules are ABF rules. Players use every type of system and convention imaginable. Currently, the main disadvantage that I am aware of - there may be others - is that ".lin" files are not available for the results. Actual results are available during the tournaments and these can be examined and then ported into other programs, but this has to be done manually at present. The current Masterpoint exchange rate between Australia and the United States is always hotly disputed, but I understand it to be about 10 US = 1 Australian. The program works on Mac and PC. you can also set up casual tables. And it is available in Dutch. For more info you will have to go to their website. It is a not-for-profit. It is also my home club in Australia.

Australia is multi-cultural, we have to be ready for anything. Even Acol in all its accents and dialects.

The answer to your question is here:

GIB is incapable of change. It's a Terminator (and not one of the new models). - These notes correspond to GIB version 40, deployed Feb 14, 2019. https://www.bridgeba...ystem_notes.php

FWIW, here is a link to the Traveller for that hand. 3NT is a reasonable choice, but to GIB it means that you have 25+ HCP. The chances that this could occur in an unbalanced hand AND your partner could have something juicy to offer are small, but mot impossible. I had such a hand at the Club "Christmas" event when my partner put down 6 spades and a marketable slam that 2 other tables made! A transfer over 2NT does win the 2nd prize. 1st prize goes to 1 club ending in 6NT for 100% (don't ask me - they probably went to the Wharton Business School). I'm mildly offended by the "playing against the Bots" line. I'm playing against real people. Interestingly I find that I do much better in some robot tourneys compared with others. At one point I was the best Bridge player in the whole of North America (there were 2 entrants at the time :) ). Different tourneys attract fields that have different levels of ability at playing the system that the robots play. Whatever you open, you still need to be able to plan ahead for whatever rebid you might have to make. On balance 1 club gets the Stephen Bradbury award, followed by 2NT, 2C and 3NT. imho

It looks like if Nige(1) is right, then West's functional fixation on the glory of their diamonds led to their downfall. Reconstruction of the hand as presented by Nige1 - which looks reasonable, shows that the optimum is EW in 6Dx but that on the DA lead 6S= is possible. Unfortunately, on a ♦A lead only 5S can be made. Here is the pbn file. Here is the lin file. After the lead of ♦A I would call this a "Squeeze - Endplay" South ruffs the lead and plays a round of trumps collecting the singleton ♠K in West. And then plays the ♦K and ♣A to rectify. This leaves a nice long tube of trumps in hand. Now, South plays the ♠2 to the ♠J which East wins and any card that East plays gives the contract to South. A Club is collected in dummy disposing of a heart loser followed by the ♥A A low heart gives the ♥Q then the ♥A and ♣K, and the ♥K gives the ♥A, ♥Q and ♣K. Obviously there is absolutely no doubt at all that I would have seen all of this in an instant, the moment that dummy went down. Possibly 2 days before. Even if it's completely wrong.

My first card game was rummy, which my Bobe taught me sitting at a little table at the front of the Bazaar. She always won. As a teenager, I played chess. Chess has some great words. Why waste. Also, why not cannibalise some German words and put them to good use. Here's a start. Scoredenfreude - the pleasure that you take when you get positive imps, or more than 50% because the opponents made a terrible mistake. This mostly applies when your own running total is abysmal.Zugzwang - A card that you play to put the opponents into an impossible position - like endplay, but harder to pronounce.Zwischenzug - in-between move, For example, a card that you play in order to establish a suit while you still have stoppers in the other suits. A great word because it's much harder to pronounce than Zugzwang.Patzer - your partner if you score badly.Detritophagic - the look someone has when their partner passes a Texas transfer.

The bidding problem: Here is the original South hand. What's your call? KR (below) rates it at 25.45 or 26+ [hv=pc=n&s=saq5haktda842cakj]133|100[/hv] The ending (mine anyway): I just started reading about squeezes. Not a great topic during a pandemic. When this hand came up. I had reached a state of aporia when I thought of an old Tom Clancy novel (I apologise for having read it). The hero claims to have specific knowledge about a submarine manoeuvre called "the Crazy Ivan" where the boat Captain makes a random turn every 30 minutes. Having reached the following position, and with no apparent way out I decided to try it out by letting the West robot solve the problem for me. Your lead from South to make 4 more tricks . [hv=pc=n&s=shd842ckj&w=sh2djtcq2&n=st8hd96c7&e=Shdk7c543]399|300[/hv] The pbn file https://tinyurl.com/y9ol5r64 The lin file https://tinyurl.com/ycxjxtx4 KR = https://tinyurl.com/yawn86hx

Thank you for that David - that's exactly the sort of information I was looking for. It's possible that there is an homogeneity of meaning for the 1♣ opening in some parts of the world. Where I play, it can mean almost anything.

I know what system I play. When I ask for an explanation of a bid or call, I want that information so that I can structure a defence against it. If the Opponents open 2♣ meaning I have a weak hand with 6+ clubs, that is a very different thing to I have a hand with 8-9 playing tricks. I want to know so that I can devise an appropriate defence. As I stated in my question "As a defender..." I want to know what action I need to take if the pair that I play against choose to open 2+ rather than 3+. In Australia anyway, Pairs sit at the table saying we play SAYC and then bid 1C 2+ or 3+. How am I assisted in structuring my defence? Is there any important Bridge difference that the Defenders need to be aware of? You say that it is "not unreasonable to play different defences against these alternatives" suggesting that you do understand my question. What are these alternatives? I would like to know.

As they say some things are best said unsaid

Speaking of protecting the "innocent" and not shaming anyone, this happened a moment ago https://tinyurl.com/y7yhauxv Mind you, it also happened once at the Club. At which point there was a furious Director call: "You can't...", but apparently you can - even when a Director is present. Some people have no shame.