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I do not like the suggestion to place tables with free seats at the top of the main bridge club list, as this causes the list to change more, and you do not find a specific table as easily as now. Please leave this like it is. Karl

Hi McBruce, I think Law 12A is not applicable for the case of the last board of the round that cannot be played, because the previous boards took too long. Both 1. and 2. deal with cases that are not covered by other laws, they sound very unspecific. If und 2. the words "... if no rectification can be made that will permit normal play of the board" are used this implies for me that the board has already been started and then something unforeseeable happens that prevents the board from being assigned a normal sorce. Example for this is if the result on the traveller is unreadable or ambiguous and the 2 pairs cannot recall what the result actually achieved, or they disagree on this matter. Here, the TD _may_ award an artificial assigned score, but he is also free to judge that a normal score is the right solution as he thinks one pair has a much better memory for bridge than the other and can be trusted therefore (maybe after they are able to exactly tell how the board was played). In contrast, Law 12C1 is applicable very well: if the board is not played, then there can be no result for sure, and the director is required by this law to award an artificial adjusted score. I just remember that I even awarded ave+ for both pairs recently when the delay was caused by an director call, but I was busy somewhere else and could get to this table only after some delay. The same applies to my own table (playing director), if the delay was caused by being away from my table to serve director calls. You are right that our software is easily capable of handling a session average, but I think we have to handle it according to 12C1 - no other choice possible. If the pairs do not agree which side was responsible for the delay, you might assign ave- for both sides - maybe they were both responsible. Or you can look at the board and figure out which side had the tougher decisions to make - usually they needed more time for this. If one player was at the bar at the beginning of the round and made himself another coffee, they usually remember that. Karl

I started to write the following when hotshot's post was the last one, so I did not know "makiigoca Posted on Aug 16 2004, 12:21 PM" and "skorchev Posted on Aug 16 2004, 12:23 PM" Stefan Skorchev himself told us that South was a sub. I cannot believe that he and his partner had time to discuss the bidding after some sort of 2nt opening before this board. Most likely they also did not discuss the strength of a 2nt opening. You are correct, Robert, that in SAYC of French standard this would be a 2nt opening. But we have no idea what South's idea of the stanard is here. I recently played 2f2 with a partner f2f who opened 2nt with 19-20 and 2!C - 2!D - 2nt with 21-22. Opps cannot asume only one specific range here when not alerted. Even if you think that NS agreed on something like this you cannot infer that they also agreed on some non-standard subsequent bidding after that. Karl

Gerardo, to clarify: I called director when there were 4 or 3 minutes on the clock. At this time, the player had been red for 4 or 5 minutes. The director knew that as he saw himself that the player was red. If he thought it matters he could have asked partner of the missing player how long he was red. So your assumption that I called after the board or nearly at the end of the board is not true - sorry that I failed to make this clear in the original posting. I also think that it is not a good idea to require players to inform the director immediately when some player becomes red or stops to play. This would create too much information/calls for the director. When I direct a tourney I am often called to replace a non-responsive player who then returns before I have completed the subbing. This is annoying. So I would suggest that players only call the director when they feel they do not like to wait for the missing player any longer. Do you still think I am partially at fault, and what was my fault? to McBruce: As far as I know the only case where the laws say that "session average" should be adjusted to is for boards that are not played as a part of the movement, i.e. at a sitout table. Can you please give me a hint where in the laws that common practice in f2f clubs is regulated? In my f2f club I always assign a+- or very seldom a-- if there was no time to start the second board of the round. Karl

The BBO tourney software has a feature for some time that assings A== if a board cannot be played as there is less than half the time_per_board left in the round. This is a questionable procedure, but the software cannot do better as thinking time is not yet measured and therefore it cannot be determined automatically who is responsible for the delay in the previous board. But a tourney director can do better than the software - he can see what happened and ask the players. Here is what happened to me: 2 board/round. At the beginning of round 3, one opp was subbed, this took some time but not too much. When the first board of the round was finished, the sub went red immediately. I did not call the director as I think it is up to the missing player's partner to decide when he does not like to wait for his partner any longer and call director then. But time ran out and nothing happened, so I finally called the director. See what happened: ->MCSD: <some_player> red for quite a while, would like ave+ [The director promptly subbed the missing player, and immediately after that:] TD: Automated message: Der Turnierleiter hat das Ergebnis von Board 6 auf A== gesetzt. (Tisch 21) ->TD: sorry, a= is not acceptable if opps are red ->TD: we are entitled to a a+ [no response] [...] [after the tourney] ->TD: hi - would like to talk with you about the a== in board 6 if you got time TD (Lobby): sure go ahead ->TD: we could not play it because an opp was red ->TD: I believe we should get a+ in this case ->TD: so why a== ? TD (Lobby): o bhidd is made, no card is played, only correct is averige TD (Lobby): sry no bidd is made, no card played ->TD: the laws state that if a board could not be played, the innocent side should get a+ TD (Lobby): or a= ->TD: no, there is no or TD (Lobby): there is no law about that ->TD: I shall look it up and give you the exact words TD (Lobby): ty, i will be dligted ->TD: law 12A 2. Normal Play of the Board Is Impossible ->TD: The Director may award an artificial adjusted score if no rectification can be made that will permit normal play of the ... ->TD: board (see Law 88). ->TD: law 88: In a pair or individual event, when a non-offending contestant is required to take an artificial adjusted score ... ->TD: through no fault or choice of his own, such contestant shall be awarded a minimum of 60% of the matchpoints available to ... ->TD: him on that board, or the percentage of matchpoints he earned on boards actually played during the session if that ... ->TD: percentage was greater than 60%. ->TD: this is called a+ here TD (Lobby): this is online bridge so averige stands ->TD: please tell me where it is stated that the laws of duplicate bridge do not apply online? TD (Lobby): also partner od disconnected player is also inocent side is it not? ->TD: it is not clear what to award to the other pair ->TD: you may argue for a+ or a- ->TD: but we are innocent for sure TD (Lobby): so i put a= ->TD: you could also award a+= ->TD: this would be + for NS and = for EW TD (Lobby): so then it would be 520-60%? TD (Lobby): 50-60% sorry TD (Lobby): no ave is correct ->TD: it was an IMPs tourney, so it would have been 3 for us and 0 for them TD (Lobby): sry about that TD (Lobby): it is 0-0 ->TD: y a== is 00 TD (Lobby): so it is correct result for that board ->TD: do you read the forums? TD (Lobby): sry no, i read rules ->TD: do you know the BBO forums? TD (Lobby): y i do, and i'm a well known director, sa may be u know ->TD: I shall post this case in the tourney director bbo forum, in case you like to know what others think about it ->TD: have a nice day TD (Lobby): please do Was I right to request a+ for our side? The director was really a well-known director. Karl

Hi Stefan, your adjustment looks to me as if you adjusted to what deems right to you, disregarding the requirement of the laws. I shall explain this in detail: Please read Law 12, section C. C1 states that an artificial adjusted score should be assigned if no result could be obtained. Your a== was artificial, but they did get a result at the table. Even if you were right to assign an artificial adjusted score, it could not be a= for EW, because they did nothing wrong and should get a+ therefore. If you think you should make an adjustment to an assigned score, you need to find an infraction of a law first by NS and that all requirements for an adjustment are there. There are basicly 2 that might apply: Unauthorized Information (UI) or failure to explain. I cannot see any sign of UI here. And as South was a sub it is highly unlikely that they had already an agreement for this situation that might not have been disclosed. For sure you will not find any law that entitles the director to adjust for the reason "is not bridge bid"!!! Please do not do that again. When you are director you are not teacher. To hotshot 2): a bid of 3!C as an response to some type of 2nt opening is virtually never natural. And if it really was agreed to be natural, it should be still alerted as this is highly unusual. So the only thing you can infer from no alert with such a 3!C is that it has been forgotton or there is no agreement. If you need to know the agreement, just ask. Most likely the correct answer in this case is "no agreement". If EW did not ask, there can never be an adjustment. And if they asked an get "no agreement", adjusting could only be considered if it turns out that NS do play together often and in fact have some agreement or should have one on 3!C. To the question of the original poster, if it is correct that the director was called so late: Law 9B1a states: "The Director must be summoned at once when attention is drawn to an irregularity." But nobody is required to draw attention to the irregularity at once. If players were required to do that, it would cause both UI and unnecessary director calls, as many cases of failure to alert or explain do no harm to opps, so the director could not do anything else than tell the offender that he should have alerted. So I would agree that the director is not called. But if you did not call the director in such a case and later discover that you are damaged in a non-trivial way, I see no reason why not call the director then. However, EW in this case for sure were not able to demonstrate how they were damaged. Karl

Hi Robert (hotshot), I agree with Helene that cross-IMPs already compensates most of the problem that Butler tries to avoid by ommitting the extremes when calculating the average. But your example shows that still the pairs who bid and made 6S earn 1.26 IMPs for just doin the normal thing. And their opps lose that IMPs without doing anything wrong. So you still like that those who reach the par score not compared against the extremes. Unfortunately you do not provide an algorithm that determines what is an extreme and how many are to be avoided. And should the extremes be compared against other extremes or not? Even if you leave the extremes out, those pairs that make no overtrick would get -0.33 IMPs and the ones with overtrick would get +0.72 IMPs. But the NS pairs cannot do anything about the overtrick - it just depends on wether the opps lead their ♣A or not. Of course this kind of problem can never be avoided unless you assign scores for each result and side manually. But it has about the same magnitude like the one that you like to avoid. And there is another problem with leaving out the extremes: Imagine in some other board all pairs play 6♠ and go down because of opps leading a singleton to partners A and get a ruff, but one pair bids 6nt that makes. This time, the 6♠ declarers deserve to lose some IMPs. According to your intention one could argue that 6nt= is the par score here and this pair should get 0 IMPs and all others -14 IMPs each. Conclusion: You run in too many problems if you try to enhance the scoring. Better just leave the cross-IMPs as they are. Karl

Good luck, Marc! It is nice of you that you do not want innocent pairs suffer from lost connection and therefore refuse to run a 0% survivor. Thinking about how to solve the problem of missing pairs in a longer tourney, I came up with the following solution: 1. A pair should never be kicked out after the round if the last action of the missing player occurred less then 2 minutes before the end of the round. 2. Like in a survivor tourney, in normal swiss pairs are kicked out in case of missing players, but only if there is an even number of pair that qualify for being kicked out. This may result one pair/round being matched against an incomplete pair, but this is better than being removed. 3. The direcotor gets the ablility to replace a missing but non-red player by "sitout", thereby creating a pair that is a candidate for the removal at the end of the round, and the chance to use the inviting subbing procedure on this sitout subsequently. This way, you never really need subs - all missing player issues can be solved by incomplete pairs leaving automatically at the end of the round. And in order avoid a complete pair having a sitout for several board, just make it 1 board per round. This is also causes the breaks between the rounds become shorter. It is always really boring if you finish both boards of a round within 8 minutes to have to wait 8 minutes after that. Karl

In my oppinion irdoz made that point clear in some post before, and I am very astonished that you still believe your idea is a good one. I shall explain again why it is inefficient and impractical, maybe this will help. You are proposing that a tournament director should post his decisions to a forum where they are reviewed by some authority that gives feedback if deemed necessary. This implies that all decisions should be posted, because if the director selects among the decisions he has made, he probably omits one that is clear to himself but still wrong. Now imagine a 12-board tourney with 40 tables/director, and asume that a director makes 10 decisions there, which sounds rather few. Each should be documented with a hand diagram, the bidding, the relevant chat log, all with names changed. And of couse there should be given some reason for the decision. This can be even non-trivial for an adjustment of an unfinished board, if you adjust to a non-artificial score though there are more than one possible results, but you think the one you adjusted to is the most likely one. My rough estimation is that this takes 15 minutes per decision, so that you are busy for total 2.5 hours after a tourney that lasted 1.5 hours if all went well. I call this inefficient! And because it is inefficient, you will hardly find a director who would be willing to do it, therefore it is impractical. Karl

Hi Luke Warm, I understand that you have been frustrated by decisions of other directors that were not correct in your oppinion. In f2f bridge you can call an appeals committee in such a case. Here in BBO we do not have something like this. So you propose a forum where players can present their case and directors have to answer that otherwise they get a bad rating? Maybe this is not exactly what you had in mind, but I read your posts twice and did not get a better understanding of it. I can tell you my oppinion about this proposal: Yes I make errors when directing. Sometimes a player involved sends me a private message and ask me to review the decision. Normally I do this, and sometimes I find the error myself and correct it. But there are more cases where I cannot find an error and so I tell the player that the decision stands. If the player likes to have that decision reviewed in a forum ("general brigde discussion" seems to be a good choice as the name sounds like many people read this forum - who cares about the tournament forum), he is free to do so provided he does not metion my name and the name of my tourney. He may even give very limited facts and a lot of private oppinion about the case, like the original poster here did, and maybe he gets an answer though. I can join that discussion or stay outside, no problem. But if my name was made public and I was going lose reputation by staying outside, I rather would quit directing in order to prevent something like that from happening. I like to be in control about where I spend my time and where not. About the case that was discussed here, I stongly support what McBruce and Irdoz said! Karl

While I read all this I miss 2 points: 1. When I play in a tourney, in 90% of the cases all goes well, no director is called at my table ever. The 10 other % consist mainly of cases where opps are missing or play slow, which are handled by nearly any director in an acceptable way. So maybe there is 1% of the tourneys I play where I see relevant director action that is worth to be rated. And even if a player encounters a relevant case, sometimes he just disagrees with the director because he does not know the laws, but instead belives that what he thinks is right has to be right. Or the rude players - what kind of rating would you expect? I conclude that players rating a director does not make much sense. 2. On the other hand, when I decide about which tourney I would like to play, I would rather play in a tourney where I know that the direcotors are polite, fight rudeness, check cheating accusations and report to abuse if they look reasonable after reviewing some boards, know the laws of duplcicate bridge and the online regulations in BBO, are willing to rule according to this, try hard to adjust unfinished boards to the most likely result, can type fast, limit the number of pairs to match the number of directors, do not exclude kibitzers, do not delay the start of the tourney and do not add time in clocked tourneys unless the failure to add time would cause too many unfinished boards. All this I cannot know in advance. Maybe I can know by experience, if playing a lot of tourneys, but I have a bad memory for bad experiences and rather like to remember the good ones. :angry: What I would suggest therefore that hosts who care rate themselves in their tourney description, maybe just make a statement to each point I mentioned under 2. I would expect that this rating is correct most time. Karl

Tim, for tourneys there are 2 different types of files generated: first type is the same like generated at a table in the main bridge club, and contains all hands you have played at a table. The filename consists of the current date and a number. The second type is a file containing all hands of the tourney. The filename includes the word "tournament". I usualy never look at the first type of files. The only disadvantage with it is that it is generated when the tourney ends, so you cannot use it when you are dummy. But instead, you can use the MOVIE window then to review the boards already played in the tourney. I would suggest to avoid to create the first type of files during tourneys, thereby reducing the size of the hands directory. The filename of the second type should start with the date when it was played, this way making it easier to be found. Karl

if anybody thinks about a discount rate for less wealthy BBO users, we should keep in mind that only credit card holders are able to acquire BBO$ (maybe US citizens have other means). OK, here in Germany anybody who likes can get a credit card provided he has no bad records at the some sort of financial intelligence agency called "Schufa" - and really poor people tend to have bad records there. But even if you can get one, the price is 24 Euros a year (maybe there are cheaper ones) and if you need it only to buy BBO$ (likely in Germany), I would expect you to be not too poor if you get one for this purpose. I expect that credit cards are limited to wealthy people in regions other than North America and western Europe. If this is true, it would not make much sense to offer discount rates for not so wealthy users because you will not find many of them among the credit card holders. And, I have really no idea how to distinguish between rich and poor, even if it made sense. A friend told me about chatting with a lady from India recently, and it turned out that her father was wealthy. Karl

hi Uday, I suggest don't waiste time for barometer scoring for unclocked tourneys. Sending new scores to everyone when a board is finished seems to consume too much bandwidth. And if you delay sending results until all pairs have finished a board, the results will be delayed a lot for the fast tables. Karl

Hi Jack, in a normal swiss movement the number of tables never changes. If you make a survivor with 0% cut this is the same if nobody ever loses connection. But if at the end of a round there are pairs with at least 1 player missing (totally red), then these pairs are excluded from the tourney. If this results in an odd number of pairs, the pair worst score so far is excluded, too. This sounds nice at the first glance. But there are several disadvantages: 1. In order to avoid a sitout table the exclusion of a complete pair is done no matter how many boards have been played yet. So maybe one bottom and a board you could not finish because of slow opps already kicks you out of the tourney. This is even worse if you have 1 board/round. I strongly recomment that in a survivor a complete pair should never be kicked out with less than 4 boards played. 2. Wether you have to leave the tourney or not depends on the time when you lose connection. If this occurs in the middle of the round your odds to come back in time are not bad, though the game is delayed. But if you lose connection near the end of the round, maybe with all boards finished already, then you are kicked out if you cannot make it back before the next round starts. There should be some delay after a lost connection before the pair is really kicked out. 3. The whole thing does not work for players who are not totally red, but only have red dot or no indication of their bad connection besides that they do not play. It would help here if such players became totally red after no action for some time, as I proposed in another thread. Karl

Hi Gweny, I am not proposing unclocked events. What I have in mind is clocked. Slow pairs are allowed to finish a board in play after the round change, but the round change does occur at the time scheduled for most pairs. As slow pairs eventually miss a board and automatically get ave- for it, it does not pay to play slow. After missing a board a slow pair will be in sync with the other pairs again. As for time measurement, this can be done in the server or in the client. The client could measure his own thinking time acurately and transmit it to the server when the board is finished. This would be thinking time only, and not time waisted by bad connections. I think it is sufficient to have that one, and it would use only little bandwidth. Karl

To Frosty: I like all the ideas you present in your post. However, all this would become less important to have if my ideas were implemented. But maybe improving the tables list for directors is far easier to implement, then this would be a nice start. 3 additional ideas, relating to yours: You described an independent window with director tools, which should contain a round clock. Rather, it should contain a round clock for each section. For the tables list, there should be a filter that restricts the display to tables with open calls pending and one button to switch this filter on and off. And tables should be greyed or something like that when they have completed the current round. Karl

Question 1: Yes undos are for misclicks only. A misclick might be that you click on 4 instead of 3 or on ♥ instead of ♠. But it is impossible to misclick both level and suit, especially if the suit symbols are so far from each other like ♠ and ♣. This means North's undo was not for a misclick, but he changed his mind. This way he made 2 bids instead of one which is totally illegal. Therefore this is an automatical 60/40, acompanied by a procedural penalty if that was possible with the bbo software. Question 2: As undos are for misclicks only, the partner should asume that it was a real misclick, and so the original bid is totally meaningless. Hence there cannot be any UI. But this does not apply here as there was no misclick and the 60/40 should be given for North's bidding twice alone, regardless what South does subsequently. Question 3: Of course 4♣ by South is more than strange here. But again that is not relevant for the adjustment. But it shows that not only North bid twice but also South regarded the first bid, which should have been a misclick, as a real bid. I would add some IMPs to the procedural penalty if I was able to give one. Question 4: already answered above. Karl

During the last several weeks I helped to direct some more and larger tourneys than I normally do. Normally, this is directing the Friday tourney for the Beginner/Intermediate Lounge with about 8 tables, 1 substitutions, 3 unfinished boards to be adjusted and no other direcotor calls. For this purpose, the software is very nice and no reason to change anything (except for the normal clocked movement perhaps that could be improved to allow such small tourneys with 1 board per round and still no replays). But when directing large tourneys, even if there are some directors working together, I am busy nearly the whole tourney and often cannot serve calls in time, probably resulting in frustrated players. What are the calls about? 1. Sub requests 2. calls because of slow play mostly due to connection problems 3. calls for adjustment of unfinished boards 4. other reasons I believe other reasons are only 5% at most, so we should concentrate on the issues 1-3. What could be done to facilitate the task of directing regardging these types of calls? 1. There are 2 possible solutions. But for both, it is required to have a standard how long should be waited for a player's action when it is his turn to bid or play. I call this the maxthinktime. It could be specified in the tourney creation dialog. It is not necessary that the server is involved in the surveilance of this time, the clients at a table could do so as well. They should send a message to the server when this time has elapsed. If the connection of the player in question is still alive, his client should warn him 10 seconds before the maxthinktime elapses. When maxthinktime has elapsed and the player has not bid/played, his partner should be given the opportunity to select a sub from the sub list. If the partner does not do this 20 seconds later 2 different things could happen: Either the server initiates the subbing automatically, or the pair is excused from the tourney, and the current board is given to any director in order to be adjusted. It should be possible to select the method how to deal with missing players in the tourney creation dialog. Personally, I would chose excusion from the tourney as this does not require any subs in order to work. If this was implemented, direcotors would not have to deal with missing players anymore. 2. Each client measures the time any player at the table uses for bidding and playing, accumulated over the whole board. These times are submitted to the server when the board is finished. Now, if a decision has to be made concerning who was responsible for the delay, this figures could be used both by the software and by the director in order to find the appropriate action. As players would know that this happens, there would be no advantage of playing slow anymore, and no need to call the director to tell him about slow play, as everyone knows the software will tell him if he needs to know. 3. The laws of duplicate bridge do not know the notion of an "unfinished board". Instead, they state that any board that was started to bid should be finished even after the director calls to change tables for the next round. There is no reason why this should not be handled this way in online bridge, and in fact, other sites handle it like this. It would result in pairs having to wait for their opps of course because they are still playing in the previous round. But it is better that some pairs have to wait than nearly all pairs have to wait because of super-long minutes per board because few pairs that are slow. In case of difficult boards or massive loss of connection, the server should delay the change of tables until at least e.g. 95% of all tables have finished the round. Of course, if there is not enough time left in a round to have a chance to finish a board in time, it should not be started, which is already implemented. But with times recorded as described in (2.), the software could determine who was responsible that a board could not be played and assign an appropriate artifitial score automatically (ave== is never appropriate in my oppinion). Of course, when switching tables for the next round, a swiss movement has to know the results in order to match the pairs accordingly. But in case of boards still being played, the %/IMPs of the boards already finished could be used for those pairs. Or, as an alternative, those pairs are not included in the swiss calculation but matched against each other as soon as they become available. There is a trick possible to greatly reduce the number of tables still playing in the previous round: Software included in each client determines if a board can be claimed because it is really impossible by any play to achieve different numbers of tricks. When this state is reached, the server is informed, so that at the time of the round switch an auto-claim is performed, and the pairs can start the next round in time though they had not finished the previous board in the traditional sense. Most unfinished boards need only 1 or 2 tricks to be played and therefore easily qualify for such an auto-claim. Also, if playing in round n-1, the auto-claim could occur immediately when possible, thereby reducing the waiting time. Conclusion: If all this was implemented, the workload for directors would be greatly reduced, and fewer directors could run more, longer and larger tourneys - in my oppinion running a bigger tourney for more than 12 boards is just to much stress for the directors given the current software. And probably more people would be willing to host and direct tourneys. I do not believe in directorless tourneys, however, as there will always be some issues that cannot be handled by software. At least, those could be handled by a human director then, because he has time for it and is not called for a substition in the middle of a difficult case of e.g. unauthorized information. One more thing about survivor tourneys: Except in cases of own connection problems, a pair should _never_ be kicked out of the tourney before it has _played_ at least 4 boards. If this results in a table with a sitout pair, because this pair had been excused because of bad connection, so be it. Karl

Thanks Fred! All of your plans sound very nice. However, I would not change the layout of the user interface. Yes, it does not contain a lot of graphics, and yes, maybe there might be better colors. But for me the main thing is, that it serves its purpose very well, and it is fairly easy to introduce it to newcomers! I can imagine that rewriting the client is necessary in order to ease maintenance of a then better-structured code. But If I would do it, the result would exactly _look_ like the current version from the users point of view. As for 1024x768 support I think this is not really needed. I work with this resolution and everything is nice for me. But if you have a flat screen with a natural resolution of 1280x1024, the BBO window becomes rather small - this is worth to be improved. The problem with such displays is that they perform best with there natural resolution only. Among the "big things" I missed any plans to ease the task of tourney directors. I have written some Ideas to this topic and shall post them in the tournament directors forum, as maybe this is not interesting for non-directors. Karl

Having a waiting list would be nice and has no disadvantages. However, it would only be in effect for tourneys that are full. So not for any club tourneys and not for any payed tourneys as far as I can see. And most of the unrestricted tourneys are not full, too. So this would apply only to a small minority of tourneys. I doubt that this would be worth the programming effort. Karl

I have used my id on a couple of different computers with different ISPs - no problem ever. I never encountered any means to delete an id - very likely that this does not exist. I asume that the disk space on the server used by an id is so small that it would be sufficient to delete ids that have not been used for say 2 years from time to time. Karl

The "remember password" feature is no problem. I somebody uses my computer, he can login with my name, but thats it - he still does not know my password and therefore cannot do it again when he has left. But he can use the edit profile dialog to change the password, and then I cannot login with my name anymore without any clue what happened. So not the "remember password" feature needs to be changed, but the 2 password fields in the edit profile dialog should be replaced by a button "Change Password", invoking a dialog that requires the user to type in the old password once and the new one twice. But I would not regard this as an urgent improvement. Karl

about "tape-delaying" the tourney play for kibitzers: I doubt it would be a good idea to implement it in the server - the server is probably busy enough already. If it was implemented in the client, the client could not display anything when you enter a table but collect what happens for the 5 or 10 minute delay and start displaying it after that delay. I doubt that most people would like to wait that long when kibbing. And if you change tables the same thing would happen again. Only solution would be a client that can look into the future and guess correctly what table you are going to kibitz in 5 minutes, like the elevator in "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" that knew that the building was going to be severely damaged within the next 15 minutes and therefore refused to go anywhere but to the cellar. Karl

QUOTE (1eyedjack Posted on Jul 19 2004, 11:51 AM)] I would accept that. I think it is a bad law, and I might lobby to change the law, but for as long as it is the law then it is a compelling argument.This law has been created clearly with kiebitzers at table in mind. If applied the way McBruce suggests, there must not only be no kibs at online tourneys but also no online vugraphs and even no vugraphs at the tournament side like they had in Malmö. This is simply ridiculous. My oppinion is that kibitzers should be allowed. First of all because if something like cheating is going on, the last thing I would accept is that these cheaters force us to make decisions that make the environment less enjoyable. This would be a victory for the cheaters. However, I did co-direct in a tourney several times where kibitzers were not allowed. I asked the host about it and he explained that he knows the names of pairs who did not show up anymore since the time when he first disallowed kibitzers, and he had suspected them of cheatin before. Then, one day, the host was not able to direct the tourney himself, and somebody had allowed kibitzers for this tourney. My attention was drawn to a pair by their opps, and I looked at their boards after the tourney and found enough evidence that I reported that pair to abuse. I had not much time to kib this pair during the touney, but when I came to their table close to the end one time there was a kib present with no country and empty profile and with no records in myhands, as I found out later. But even after having found this case I still believe that kibs should be allowed. I rather encourage others to look at the boards of suspected pairs and report them, too. This way we do not only get those cheaters who cheat with kibs, but potentially all of them, except maybe very cautious ones, but I doubt that very cautious cheaters exist. And, as I said before, I would not enter the sublist of a tourney without kibs as there is no way to tell how many boards are left to be played. If all did the same these tourneys would be always out of subs. Karl