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I think payed tourney advertisements would be ok if they were not received by - anybody who could not participate as there are not enough BBO$ in his account - anybody currently playing in a tourney or a team game - anybody at a teaching table Karl

It makes a difference if a player gives a poor information of his bids though he was able to give a better one, or if a poor fool is acting. Here, a Polish player expects a Norwegian to know that his opening is Wilkosz. But even if the Norwegian knows Wilkosz, he would not expect the Pole to use it unless discussed. So it is quite foolish by the Pole to open this. Nevertheless, the contract reached is the best one for your side, as you cannot make 3nt without opps' help, and 5D does not make at all. So what is left is the possible misinformation to your partner. But: Either he knew Wilkosz, then all is ok. Or he didn't know. Then it is easy for him to ask for a better explaination. Only if he did ask and the Pole did not explain, we have a case. But even if your partner had to guess what the opening meant, I consider S a poor lead. Even without explanation I would expect North to have some Spades for his 3S bid (this was not alerted, after all). I cannot cost anything to lead a H and have a look at the dummy. Then he sees that he can ruff H, play another H and then DA and a D. This will easily set the contract. So, as a director, I would likely let the result stand for your side, and only adjust the score for opps, if that was possible with the software. If your partner did not ask, I would not change anything. Describing Wilkosz in detail to somebody who never heard of it involves some typing, and in order not to waste time unnecessarily, I would accept that only the name of the convention is used and full description is only given on request. Private chat to both opps is available for that purpose. Karl

Maureen, I was never annoyed by any of your messages - please go ahead without worrying too much! Karl

All but 3) are very reasonable suggestions. About 3): You are obviously referring to the situation where you can see 2 tricks at the same time, when the last card of a trick has just been played. But I think that beeing able to see 2 tricks simultaneously is not really intended. Just as a convenience, the cards remain open after the last card has been displayed. After all, you cannot control how long you see both tricks anyway unless you have won the previous trick. Maybe an easy solution is to first look at the previous trick and then click away the bubble in order to see the bidding. Karl

I would prefer the solution that under "Play Bridge!" there are 3 entries regarding tourneys: "Scheduled Tournaments", "Tournaments in Progress" and "Finished Tournaments". Only the scheduled tournaments need filters. Only the scheduled tournaments should appear when you are at a table and klick on "Tourneys" there. Exception: If I am currently playing in a tourney, this tourney should appear first, as there is no other way to verify the tourney settings of the tourney I am currently playing. About the filters: it should be possible to filter for $/free, indi/pair, MP/IMPs/othes, min/max number of boards, min/max minutes per board, full/not-yet-full, playing/non-playing-director, restriced/non-restricted and a list of hosts/directors where I am not going to play again. Non-restricted should show exactly those tourneys I would be able to play. Country, Language and Level should be possible to be selected if each of them should apply for restricted/non-restricted, as these criteria can be changed in one's profile in order to meet the restrictions of the tourney. This is especially true for language, because I can speak English though I prefer to set my language to German, but no problem to change it to English while playing in such a tourney. About playing/non-playing-director: If any of the directors of a tourney is registered for his own tourney, the tourney should be automatically marked as a playing-director-tourney, maybe by a "PD" symbol at the left-hand side of the host's name. If a tourney is full this should be visible by some icon in the list of tourneys. Or even better, display the entries/max figures so that you can immediately see how urgent it is to register, even if you are currently playing at some table. Karl

hrothgar: I still believe that the most important reason to play the payed tourneys is that there are many more of them than free tourneys. If you restrict yourself to free tourneys, you often cannot play when you would like to. And often a free tourney is already full when you discover it. Unfortunately nobody responded to the second argument in my post, that frequent directorless automatically launched tourneys would serve the same purpose as a permanent floating tourney, but could be implemented with much less effort. This was my main point. Karl

I doubt that the effort to implement this idea is justified by the added value the customers of bbo gain from this. If it is desired to have the frequent opportunity to join a tourney, even today there are a lot of tourneys available where you have to pay a $. I guess that a free tourney where you can enter any time would compete with the current payed tourneys and draw customers away from them. Neither the directors of the payed tourneys nor the BBO management could be really happy with that, as both earn well-deserved money with the current tourneys. But even if not considering this topic, I would rather suggest to have directorless tourneys that automatically start say every half hour (both indi and pairs). This would require nearly no extra coding, apart from some method to avoid unfinished boards and to get rid of non-responsive players. But these would be devellopments to the benefit of all tourneys. Karl

I suggested this long time ago, but Fred was afraid that some people might dislike losing control over their cards. I still believe this would be worth while implementing. And along with this, no ave- in a tourney if the round ended during last trick. Karl

Hi Dean, you can avoid this problem by using Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/). This browser always opens a new window when invoked by an application. And this is only one of the advantages. I use Firefox only since some weeks. Karl

Maybe just invert the option and call it "Dummy sees all hands" - default would be off. Btw, I suggest that "Barometer" is on by default. Karl

At my local club we play 26 boards. If there are 19 tables or less, there is only 1 section. With 20 or more tables, we make a 13-table-section and another section with the remaining tables. Boards are duplicated during the first round, so we can compute one single result for both sections. No, programs dedicated to this task do their job better than a spreadsheet application probably could. Karl

Free, I agree with you that if looking at the tourneys form a table the blue tourneys not yet started should be displayed first. I already suggested this in the forum when the software still displayed all tourney lists the old way, or maybe when the new way had just been beta-implemented. Maybe it is not easy to implement to have two different sortings of the same list. Karl

I have sympathy for both arguments, pro and contra subbing subs. However, in the current environment, tds do not have really a choice, even if there was no penalty for being subbed out: If most tds sub out subs, many subs would not sub again. Often I sub for a tourney just started or with quite a number of boards yet to be played, and I expect to be allowed to play all them if chosen. And even more important: If a player has encountered a connection problem once, it is likely that it will happen again. Nobody will convince me to take the chance of being forced to sub again. On the other hand, there is another possible solution for the problem of missing players that I would prefer: players with a missing partner should have the option of either getting a sub themselves or quitting the tourney, thereby generating a sitout table. As soon as this happens to another pair, the problem is solved, and the tourney has one table less. If there are missing players at the time of the round switch, the pairs involved could be matched against each other or against the sitout pair. Cards should not be shown until there are 4 active players at the table. This would make it possible for the software to reseat remaining pairs if a player with a missing partner decides to quit short after the start of a round. Karl

Hello Robert (hotshot)! This is not true. These are just not yet implemented in BBO. Rather than implementing your proposal I would propose implementing this, and I already did for 1). I think 3) is never a good idea. And I doubt you gain anything with 4). 5) - the need of subbing - certainly exists. But this is a problem no matter what type of tourney you run. Karl

A tourney is a competition and determined to produce a winner. Conditions should be the same for all, and fair. This includes that there should be a predefined number of boards and a predefined time range. Missing a board should be the exception. A pair who is responsible for a board that could not be played should never benefit from that. And a pair that was not responsible should not have a disadvantage through that. These are the conditions that traditionally rule face to face tourneys. There are no reasons why they should not hold online, and this proposal does not meet them. I consider it extremly unfair that you can be dragged into a group of slow pairs, and this way have to play significantly less than all boards. This is as undesirable as playing for a much too long time like in the current unclocked tourneys if you are unlucky. Karl

Nice idea, Gabor and Stefan. I would add: people currently playing in a tourney or a team fight should be not alerted. Directors who are currently directing should be not alerted. This is especially desirable for the acbl tourney alerts that we receive frequently - I believe they are issued manually so far. There is no problem with such an automatical alert for payed tourneys, too. However, it should supressed for users with an empty bbo$ account. And also restricted tourneys should be only alerted to players who pass the restrictions. Additional suggestion: in the list of scheduled tourneys, those the user cannot play due to the restrictions should be displayed in a different color. That would it make much easier to get an overview over what is available to me. Karl

I can only think of one valid reason to delay the start of a tourney: Many BBO users encounter connection problems short before the tourney is scheduled to start. Waiting for another tourney to finish is no valid reason for me. About extra time for a round: I do this only if too many tables are still playing 30 seconds before the normal end of the round. If I didn't I probably would not have enough time to do the adjusting. (I hate to leave a Ave-, most time this is a good result for the pair that caused the delay.) Often, when I give extra time, only few seconds of it are really needed, and the software performs the round swich when the last table is ready. And - if there is only one table still playing in extra time, I try to adjust while they are still playing, finishing the round this way. Karl

I would log private chat in tourneys and team fights, and the director should be able to download the chat for a selected round and table. This is needed to determine if explainations were given correctly, and if and how they were requested. The chat log should contain the bids and cards played and the explainations attached to the bids. Each entry in the log should be preceeded by a time stamp. Karl

The current format of the bidding history is WNES, and I like this. All players are used to it. Please do not change. Karl

Thanks Uday It is fine with me that I do not have to ping myself and the software does the job for me and shows the result with the red dot. But if I run a tourney, I find players that have the red dot much longer than the others are willing to wait. So I have to apply the subbing procedure that requires me to type in 2 names, which really takes some time. Also, software does not ask the sub for permission if this method is used. So I have to ask the sub after I subbed him in if it was ok for him and sub again if I took a player who is away from his computer. Or I get someone who is already registered for some other tourney and did not care to remove himself from the sub list ---> players should be removed from all sub lists automatically when they register for a tourney. Therefore I suggest that after 2 or 3 minutes (I would say 2) with a red dot a player should become totally red and this way candidate for the easy subbing procedure that can be applied by his partner, too. The other problem with unresponsive players are those who do not produce a red dot. This can be caused by a player who is away from his computer, but I often had the impression that it may be some kind of connection problem, too, but the internal ping is still working. But, if you use only one tcp connection for each client, this cannt be possible, as tcp guarantees that the sequence of data is not disrupted. Maybe you have an explanation for this. In case that a player really thinks for more than 2 minutes I would suggest that the client asks him if he is still there, and puts him into a subbable state if he does not answer this question within 15 seconds - just for the people who think that the incoming phone call is urgent enough to let 3 others wait and probably create an unfinished board. Karl

jtfanclub, now I understand your idea, thanks for explaining. I assume you gave that 30-victory-point-scale only to make your 1-victory-point-system clearer. In your tourneys you have 4 rounds with 4 boards each. I think it would be likely there that you have several pairs with 4VP at the end, and therefore several winners. Maybe that will help to make the system popular. :) But I agree with mpefritz about the merits of this scoring system: Pairs with a good score in the first board never bid a slam in the second if there is any risk, because they do not really need the additional points for the slam. And pairs with a bad score will take any risk. This affects the IMP scoring of the second board in an unforeseeable way. And something else: imagine all board in a round are completely flat. Still, at some tables strange results will be produced, so that the IMPs for the majority of the pairs will not be 0 but slightly above or below. Who is above and who is below is pure luck then. And this luck decides about wether you get your victory point for the round or not. If you do not get it, you cannot win the tourney anymore, no matter how good or bad you perform in the other rounds. This sounds most unfair to me. Karl

It was a good idea to place the running and finished tourneys at to top ot the tourneys list. But if I view that list from a table, I would prefer the old sequence as this enables me to see if there have new tourneys been scheduled or how much time is left for the tourney where I am registered. With the old sequence this was avialable with a single mouseclick. Karl

jtfanclub, abouth the waiting: the sum of all waiting is not as important as the length of a single break between rounds. If I have to wait 7x3 minutes, I do not care too much - probably I like to have a look at the 2 boads anyway. But if I have to wait 3x6 minutes this is rather long each time. And - I usually wait at the end of the tourney too - in order to see the result. About your scoring system: I did not understand it! "You use IMPs" is not an explanation. This is like saying "you use numbers" when explaining how to multiply. Karl

Without knowing the exact hands of your opps and assuming that the 2♦-bidder alerted and explaind his bid himself, I would think that he either did not know what is Michaels or he psyched. Even if he really thought that Micheals meant that 2♦ would be for the minors, this is no misinformation as long as his partner's bidding suggests that they really agreed on Michaels (e.g. partner bid ♥ twice on a 2=3 distribution of the majors). So there is nothing to do for the director, as errors (such as a wrong idea of how some convention is defined) are not punished, even if they turn out to be lucky for the erroneous side. However, the declarer side is not required to accept the explanation "Micheals". So after he bid 3♣ I might have asked by private chat "I do not know 'Micheals'. Can you explain please?". The answer would make everything clear. Karl

hi jtfanclub, This is a problem only if you have rounds of 3 or 4 boards. I do not like such tourneys, and I tell you why: In order to have a tourney that it as fair as possible the average skills of the opps of any given pair should be as close as possible to the average skills of all pairs of the tourney. The odds to achieve this increase if you increase the number of opps for a pair. This is done by decreasing the number of boards per round. So 1 board per round tends to be as fair as possible to this respect. However, with 1 board per round you cannot compensate time lost at the first board by playing the second faster. If you think this is an issue, 2 boards per round is a compromise. Another argument for few board per round is that the annoying breaks between the round for fast tables are longer if you have more boards per round. So I think it is not worth investing work here for a function that is needed only by few for a questionable purpose. This is easy: When you play we and they is correct. And when you kibitz or direct, we refers to NS and they to EW. Always. This is essentially what you get if you have a 2-table-tourney with matchpoints scoring, or a "board-a-match" team fight. But if you have more tables, how do you define winning and losing? E.g. with 4 tables and 4 different results, what do you score for the middle results? I cannot see how this can work for more tables. If you are director and you sub, the partner of the player to be subbed is not asked by the software if he likes his new partner. Only the player who is invited to sub is asked if he likes to, provided the subbing method is used where no names need to be typed in. Better solutions for this problem ("List of calls") have already been suggested here. Karl