mink

hi Gweny, this sounds like a serious suggestion. However, I think those tourneys will be not successful because even the players with bad connections will become bored by too many other players with bad connections. I already experienced that a player with an obviously slow connection told the others to speed up, as he always promptly played a card when he saw it was his turn, and therefore was not aware that his own connection was slow. I think Frosty is right, it cannot be unclocked, because nobody can predict how long it would take to finish, and there are very few player who would be willing to start playing a tourney without any clue of when it might end. The solution could be a survivor tourney with 0% cut, so that players that do not regain connection are automatically removed from the tourney. But I doubt that players would be happy with frequent av-, which are assigned to both pairs and not only to that pair that caused the delay. I think the following features are needed if you want to run tourneys for the bad connection players: Playing should be allowed to extend into the next round, which maybe result in missing a board. In case of missed boards, the fast pairs and those who waited for a slow pair should be awarded av+ for the missed board, and only the slow pairs should get av-. This should happen all automatically. Players should be automatically kicked out of the tourney if there is no action for 3 minutes. However, I would not recommend that those tourneys should be run without a director. Rather, there should be still a director, but there is no need to deal with subbing (as non-responsive players (and their partners) are autmatically removed) and adjusting hands where the deadline was missed (because the round switch is delayed for the slow tables). Instead, a director should be there for normal director tasks like failure to alert/explain and disciplinary issues. Karl

I was the director involved in this case, but not the host. I did not see any "no psyche" rule in the tourney description, and the player who called me did not refer to such a rule, so I believe it was not there. I asked jahol about the bid only because opp had complained and I needed to hear the other side. I was completely satisfied with the answer, so I only talked with the caller after that. What I did not know that was, however, that he had called jahol a cheater in table chat - neither player told me this. I would have acted differently if I knew. I explainded the case to the caller even after the tourney, but he was not believing that this was no cheating and nothing illegal. Looks like he took his own laws to judge what is cheating. At least, he was polite to me. Karl

There is another aspect not mentioned yet: South might think by himself: "If the claim is accepted, this will be likely because the finesse is working. If it is rejected, this will be likely because West has the ♠Q. So in case of reject I play for the drop, and if it not drops, give it to West and let the J run." Just in order to make a reasoning like this impossible the director should adjust to -1, no matter where the Q is located, except for Q or Qx with East. However, because in online bridge at BBO playing after a rejection is legal, the claimer cannot be forced to follow a certain line of play if he did not say anything. If the director cannot think of any conclusion the claimer might have drawn from the fact that opps did reject, there should be no adjustment. I would not punish anybody for the fact that a line of play was not stated though there were more than one possible lines of play. Maybe he did only see one possible line of play. Karl

hi Robert, I would rather wish to have "number of tables still playing that prevents a round switch". This should work so that the round continues when the round clock strikes zero if this number of tables or more are still playing and the round switch only takes place if the number of playing tables drops below this threshold. So you can control how many adjustments for unfinished boards you will have to make at most for each round. It should not be a new kind of tourney but an option for any tourney, even unclocked ones. "Minutes per board" should remain there and provide a starting value for the round clock. When round clock strikes 0 I think it is not necessary for players to have a clue when the round really ends, they know that they are late anyway. It would not help to display the number of tables still playing because maybe several tables finish nearly simultaneously, causing the round switch to take place. In unclocked tourneys it might help to avoid replays of the fast pairs, but this is less important of course. Karl

hi, I would assign ave- to the psyching side, ave+ to the 1nt side, look at some other boards of the psyching side and report the whole thing to abuse. I cannot think of any sane explanation for the pass - beginners and novices make other kinds of mistakes. Karl

hi, a highlight of BBO is that - in spite of all the new versions - it runs very stable, the server needs a reboot very seldom, and no client crashes. And there are only very few new bugs introduced with new version, so I always can download the newest beta faithfully. Thanks Fred and Uday. Karl

In order to inform others that you are not at the computer currently, you can right click on your own name when at a table or left click when in the lobby and check the "be right back" box near the top of your profile. Anybody who sends you a message then will be informed that maybe you do not see it. An if you really do not want any messages at all, you can log in as invisible. Having these possibilities, I do not see any need for another function that is close to this. Karl

hi I like to have a tourney with an include custom list. But maybe after I schedule the tourney there might be more I like to include. Is this possible without cancelling the tourney, thereby losing the registrations already made? Karl

I have a specific question about alerts. I know that many take their system less seriously when preempting in 3rd seat. Should this be alerted and explained, e.g. is it sufficient to explain just "multi" or should it read "5 cards or more in either major, weak"? And what should a director do if just "multi" was explained and opps lost some imps because they trusted on multi has to be a six card suit? Karl

hi Uday! I performed a search with keyword "scores" today, and the last post relevant to me was http://bridgebase.lunarpages.com/~bridge2/...?showtopic=1812 : "Now I'm confused, lol! ..." (Uday). The topic had slipped out of my mind. But last night I played #369 all skate with NickF, a very nice pickup partner. I had already shut down my computer after that, when in the bathroom I became suspicious about the result. But I was too tired to start the computer again and make a screenshot of the movie. However, today I accessed all information available to me and got the following: In the tourney results, I am listed with 55.87%. When I add the % figures in myhands, I get 61% (I know they are not corret by design). When I add the % figures in the lin file on my computer, I get 58.39%. I know that the % figures in the movie display were different from both others, e.g. for boards 7 and 8 they were both over 90% as opposed to 76.1% and 84.8% in the lin file and 76% and 89% in myhands. I also remember that to my great surprise in the movie board 4 was over 50% which was not likely to be correct. Let us look at an example - board 10. The lin file states 60.0%. Myhands states 66%. If I compute by hand according to the traveller sheet it is 66.7% (rounded, myhands simply strips the decimals). I cannot think of any way to come to 60% as there are no AVE+/- listed in the traveller sheet, and adjustments after the end of the tourney should neiter be found in the traveller sheet nor in the lin file as both are produced at the end of the tourney. I asked Frosty by BBO-mail if he made adjustments after the tourney, but he has not answered yet. I suggest you have a look at the scoring again. I shall send the lin-file by email. Regards Karl

hi, today I had a problem that sounds like the one Chamaco described in topic "Can't login in BBO" (http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?showtopic=2127). It occurred after I had installed version 3.6.7 the normal way on a windows XP machine owned by a member of my local f2f club. It had not been installed there before. After klicking on Login, immediately the message that netbridgevu could not connect to the internet was displayed. However, there was an internet connection and I was able to successfully access http://bbo.bridgebase.com:81/ with the internet explorer. I tried 3 different ISPs with XP firewall switched off, but it did not help. I did not find any other firewall installed. There was the antivir program and a dialer detector. I stopped both and tried again, but no success. I tried to find any XP settings related to the problem - nothing. Finally, after 3 hours, I gave up. I am sure that this is not a problem of the BBO server. But I have no further idea what to try on that computer. Can anybody provide me with some ideas please? Thanks a lot. Karl

hi Bridgeboy, what you propose looks to me like a clocked tourney with most pairs swtiching rounds before the deadline. The advantages are that some pairs finish earlier than the maximum time assigned for the tourney, and that there is a maximum time. The disadvantages are, that you have replays like in unclocked tourneys and unfinished boards like in clocked tourneys, that require adjustments by a director. Furthermore, this movement cannot be combined with the swiss/survivor approach, as this requires scores of the last round to be computed before a round change can take place. I suggested another approach some times in this forum: Tourney is clocked, but round change is eventually delayed until at least xx% (e.g. 95%) of the tables have finished the round. Then all pairs are seated for the next round swiss-like, but some pairs have to wait for opps who have not yet finished the previous round. Swiss seating of unfinished pairs is based on their result without the unfinished board(*). However, unlike todays unclocked tourneys, pairs that start a round late because they had to finish boads of the previous round have less time available for the current round, which maybe causes a board to be missed (already implemented today). For missed boards, ave+ or ave- is assigned depending on if the pair was responsible for the delays that caused the board to be missed or not. This would result in no unfinished boards (and therefore no need for adjustment by director), no need to add time for difficult boards as this is done automatically, tourney ends at the scheduled end time or maybe only a litte later because of time automatically added. Replays are limited to swiss-related replays which could be avoided with a more sophisticated seating algorithm anyway. Furthermore, you could assign a rather low time per board (e.g. 6 minutes) without having to worry that the directors are faced with any requests for adjustments of unfinished boards. This way, such tourneys will finish earlier than todays clocked tourneys and very much earlier than unclocked tourneys, and I think not much later than the fast group of an unclocked tourney. Karl

I consider the claiming process in BBO very well implemented. I have introduced several newcomers to BBO, which were also computer newbees, and they were able to claim without any trouble. Karl

Hi Rain, in face to face bridge there are a lot of difficult director calls because opps are misleaded by a wrong explaination your partner gives. It is a great advantage of online Bridge that you explain your bids yourself, which means that the explaination nearly never misleads the opps. Even if you accidently deviate from your system, you still tell them what you think in this moment your system is. So cases were opps are mislead by an explaination are very rare. There have been bidding sequences by opps where I felt that they had different oppinions about what they had agreed upon. In such cases I ask both opps by private chat, and normally get 2 explainations. So even if one of them has indeed forgotten the system, I am still well informed. I consider this a great improvement as compared to face to face bridge. On the other hand, the very rare cases where I deliberately deviate from my system, either slightly or by psychic call, I am self confident enough to explain what the system is. I opps think this is cheating, they are free to avoid me in future and report to abuse. Karl

hi McBruce, I see this point and you are right about it. BUT: By disallowing kibitzers you have already allowed the cheaters to celebrate a victory over the the honest players! I am absolutely supporting the reduction of cheating, but the only way to do this is to ban cheaters, and before you ban them, you have to find out about them. Often a kibitzer is more likely to detect a possible cheat than the opps of the cheater. In fact, the only case where a possible cheat was detected in one of my tourneys was by a kibitzer. I am determined, whenever I see some evidence for a cheat, to investigate in myhands and then, if it looks like there is really cheating going on, report the case to abuse. If at least the readers of this forum do the same, it should be a miracle if cheaters survive longer than a few weeks. Of couse, if this generates too much work for Uday and Fred, a commitee that verifys cheating allegations would be fine - this has already been proposed in some other thread. Ok, maybe there are some expert cheaters who do the cheating so subtile and sometimes just avoid to cheat when they could so that it is hard to detect them. However, I doubt that cheating on expert level is much of a problem. I believe that cheaters are fairly foolish, because if they had the ability to win a tourney without cheating, why should they cheat then? Karl

hi Uday! There may be tourneys with restrictions so narrow that it is not very likely that you find enough subs that meet the restrictions. For my own tourney on Fridays I would perfer that the subs are flagged in the list so I can see if they meet the restrictions or not, so I can choose a BIL member if there is any but still can sub in a non-member if there is no member available. Karl

... and also those players that are registered for a tourney starting in near future should be not displayed.

hi Uday, pro lowercase-only: You cannot distinguish between a lowercase L and an uppercase I with the font used right now. I had to guess this when subbing once. pro uppercase-allowed: easier to point out the structure of a name, e. g. InaDodd or InadOdd. If uppercase is allowed I asume that it is not significant, so that you do not have to care for upper/lower-case when typing in the name for mail or something else. Karl

This is not a bug. The "log off" button is intended to be used only when there is an internet problem or any other problem that causes the process of joining the table to last far to long, and you think that it is worth a try to log off completly from BBO and then maybe log on again. If it was not there, you could escape from this situation only with operating system tools, as the application would be blocked. Karl

Great idea! This is how I would implement it: The four players intending to play a team match gather at any ordinary table. In the table options there is a button for adding this team to the team desk, and a list of teams already already searching for opps. When adding to the list, the team captain specifies how many boards should be played (min and max number). If there is no appropriate opp team in the list, the members of the newly added team can play together at their table until they are selected from the list by another team. When you select another team from the list, you can specify how many boards you like to play. The selected team is asked then and can respond yes or no. If yes, both tables are allowed to finish the current board (if there is any board in progress) and then all 8 players are transfered to their tables in the team area. This would easily allow a pickup team to play a few boards at the ordinary table in order to see if they like each other's way of bridge before they actually register for the team desk. Karl

1NT-2♦2♠.... would show game interest in ♠, but not ♥'s.

hi John, yes, I can confirm that if you country-filter tables all tables that have at least one player from a country not selected are not displayed. On the other hand, tables with all 4 seats empty are always displayed. e.g. if I filter for USA now I get only one table with 4 US players and 10 totally empty tables. It was implemented like this from the start. Of course it would make more sense if all tables where at least one player of any selected country is sitting would be included in the list. Karl

In case enemies are excluded it is obviously a good idea to reject enemies who try to sub for the tourney. But if the tourney is restricted to members of a small club or to a friends list, it would not be a good idea to prevent non-members from subbing because that might result in having no subs at all. Karl

Very good questions/suggestion! Karl

When I directed my last tourney on Friday I had heard rumors about this feature but was not able to locate this display. However, I think a better implementation of the functionallity would be to have an option checkbox that filters the normal table list displaying only those tables not yet finished the current round. There could also be an entry where tourney host can specify a percent figure, preventing a round switch if there are more tables still playing than specified. (e.g. I have 50 tables and specified 5%, then a round switch would not take place if 3 tables or more have not finished yet.) This would result in more time given if a complicated board is played or some internet glitch causes connection problems for many players. Karl