mink

All talk about the alert form, and for sure you can easily implement one. But the harder point is, how to display the information for the opps, so that it is linked to the bid but does not cover other valueable information. My conclusion is, that the current way to display the explaination for bids is the best. But like John Goold said, it should be possible to type it in prior to submitting the bid. I also like Rado's idea of having an agreed list of abbreviations which could be displayed when typing the explaination - a click on a list element adds the abbreviation into the explaining text. If you need to give longer information you can do this by chat to both opponents, conveniently by the "<===>" button. Karl

John said: "I find I get a bit of a feel for the opponents after a couple of boards; but one board? " You have this problem always with the first board, and many times with the second, if opps couldn't do anything wrong in the first board. So only really many boards would help. There are other hints, however: do they have a convention card, what is their system, what gadgets, what kind of nicknames? But in online game, you are missing things like what do they wear, how do they behave, how do they sort their cards. In my oppinion this is a minor issue. I was just watching the end of a tourney, and a pair that I thought to play quite well endend with -46 IMPs. My impression is that most pairs in the tourneys are quite good bridge players as compared with bridge in the local club. Karl

A tourney is divided into rounds. A round is defined to be the period of time where players dont change tables and play a predefined number of boards together, which is the same for all rounds. The idea of a tourney is to play against as many opps as possible, as the fewer opps you play against the greater is the difference between the average skills of your opps and the average skills of all pairs competing. I think therfore it is fair to say that the fewer opps you play against the more your results are influenced by luck. There are 2 ways to increase the number of opps in a tourney: either by playing more boards, or, if it is desired to have a tourney of a specific length, by playing as many rounds as possible. This is reached by playing as few as possible boards per round. In face to face brigde, moving for the next round is a real overhead, so there is virtually never only 1 board per round. But whenever possible I use movements where we have only 2 boards per round, provided that you do not play more than one round against any opp pair. Tourneys in BBO appear to be so big that you even can have 1 board per round, and there is no overhead in moving for the next round - the system does it for us. The only disadvantage I can see is that as long as we have an absolute timelimit for each round, not finishing a board is likely to occur more often in 1-board-rounds than in 2-board-rounds, as if the first board needs more time you have still the chance to play the second board faster. However, if in the second board the other pair needs more time, they are under greater pressure - unfair. I suspect that this problem is even more severe if you play more than 2 boards per round, as you always find pairs that play always slow so their opps are even worse off if the have to think hard in the 3rd board. In the meantime I have seen quite a lot tourneys where more than 2 boards per round are played. I really do not understand why, and I strongly suggest to stick to 2 boards per round and maybe test 1 board per round. Karl

My way is: of two 4-card suits, bid the highest, but never spade. I do not mind bidding 1D - 1H - 1S with a balanced hand. Doing it like this, the 1S opening is nearly always 5 cards, which is nice to know - you can raise with 3 card support. If you bid 1C with 4=3=3=3, it is called Swiss Acol. I do never care if a suit is "biddable" or not - all suits are biddable for me. Karl

Hi Ruthobello and Inquiry, thanks for your advice, but it appears to me that you are referring to the normal .lin files that are recorded whenever you play/kibitz/watch vuegraph if the respective option is selected. I have these files. But when you watch the vuegraph and you are lucky, at the end of the vuegraph session an additional file vglog.linx is created. It is not located in the "hands" subdirectory, but in the top level directory of your BBO installation. It contains the data of both tables, the imps won and a nice "door" icon to change rooms for the current board. This is the file Nikos was referring to. He told me that you get it if you have the movie open at the end of a vuegraph session. But I suspect that even then the file is not always generated. Karl

hi I have found 1 such file dated 03-05-23 18:07. If you do not have this one already, I can mail it to you. I am wondering why I only found this single file, which I renamed early to give way to other files to appear. But though I watched nearly all of the Polish finals no other such file appeared. Maybe somebody can tell us what we must do to make the file appear. Karl

I dislike the idea of any additional work for the director. As long as tourneys run with a fixed movement, it should be decided simply by the time each pair used. This can be measured at the client and transmitted to the server when a board is not finished. Any pair that uses more than half of the time available should get an average minus, and any pair that used less time should get an average plus. Times when the player due to play is not at the table should not be counted as thinking time. If anybody thinks opps let run the time out, the director should be called. If one day a swiss movement is implemented, tables can finish tough the next round has started already, and their next opps simply have to wait a bit. In case of a difficult board the time for the round could be extended if too few tables are ready at the normal time. Karl

Uday told us that in the first implementation the movement is simply that NS pairs stay at their table and EW pairs go up 1 table after each round. This has a drawback: an NS pair never gets compared to an EW pair, and one could say that the NS and EW pairs play different tournaments. Often, if this kind of movement is chosen, there are 2 rankings given, and there are 2 winners. As I dislike the idea of having 2 winners, there should be some scrambling in a way that a pair can be compared to most ohter pairs of the tourney with more or less boards. The usual method to do this is to switch the direction NS/EW orientation of the pairs after some predefined round, but the moving pairs keep moving. But this does not work as desired in an online tourney, as the boards do not move from table to table but each board is played at all tables simultaneously. Here the following movement could be applied to achieve the scrambling. Assume we have 5 rounds and 5 tables. Pair A sits always at table 1 NS. Pair B sits at table 2 NS in round 1, C at 3 NS, D at 4 NS, E at 5 NS , F at 5 EW, G at 4 EW, ... and J at 1 EW. After each round NS pairs at tables 1-4 move 1 table up, EW pairs at tables 2-5 move 1 table down, the NS pair at table 5 changes direction and becomes EW at 5, and the EW pair at table 1 moves to 2 NS. This movement achieves that all pairs play NS and EW for a different number of times. In that way any pair compares to all other pairs but one, but for a different number of boards. If there more rounds than tables, this movement works for e.g. up to 9 rounds in case of 5 tables - in this case each pair plays against all others. If there are much more tables than rounds, sections of tables could be created, and the movement operates in each section independently of the other sections. Of course in the latter case a swiss movement would be more desireable, but it is also much harder to implement. The movement described here should not be only a little change to the current movement. Karl

Thanks Fred for this explaination. Did I get it right that the only purpose of dividing the tourney in sections is to speed things up?

In the mini-tournament that just ended Uday mentioned that there were 2 "sections". I asked about it and was told that they had a different clock. But why is such a thing necessary? Please Uday, when you get time for something that unimportant, could you explain a little more? Thanks! Karl

hi I am amazed how fast the tourney software has been implemented and how smooth and error free everything performed when I attended the last test tourney. As far as I have seen there were only a few test tourneys needed to achieve such a stable product. Thanks Fred and Uday! I am looking forward to the regular tourneys now. Why isn't any scheduled yet? This first implementation of course does not yet have all features one can think of. But better start it with some features missing than wait much longer for the perfect implementation. However, as some development decisions are not yet made, there is the opportunity to discuss them before development is done in an undesired direction. One issue is the time limit for one round. In the test tourney it was 15 minutes for 2 boards. The current implenetation is, that when the time is over, both pairs get an Average Minus score. I strongly believe that this is not the final rule but serves only until Uday got time to implement a better solution. What could that be? There are 2 possibilities: 1. Stick to the idea that there is a fixed amount of time for one round. But not both pairs should get the Average Minus, but only those pairs that exceeded more time than the other, and the faster pair should get an Average Plus. 2. Each board that has started is finished, as long as this is possible within 10 Minutes beyond the normal ending time of the round. If there are less than 2 minutes of normal round time left when a table is about to start a new board, this board isn't started anymore. Penalty points for playing slow are given, but only to those pairs the cause delays. Connection problems should not be punished. Another issue is the movement. For BBO tourneys I would expect more tables than rounds usually. In this case, a swiss movement could be played to enforce that the best pairs play against each other. Currently, only a simple Mitchell movement is available. Karl

I found several vuegraph hands in each file, and I found the ones I was looking for. Version 3.4.0 Karl

I just loaded the thing and played some boards. All worked fine, including reload after claims. I really didn't expect you to be so fast in launching it. I am looking forward to the tourneys, but unfortunately I cannot attend the first one starting Friday, as I have already an appointment for Face-to-Face-Bridge at that time. Karl

Myhands produced the following: Total IMPs -0.0700000000000003 :-) Karl

today I observed a few times that there was an unnecessary delay when the last trick was played. It appears to me that sometimes people simply forget to click on their last card as it it obvious that this has to be played. Therefore it would be nice if the last card is played automatically if not clicked. There should be a 3 seconds delay for each player in order to see the cards as they are played. During this delay it should be possible to click on the card to speed up things. I think this automatical play should occur unconditionally as I cannot figure out any disadvantage. Karl

My oppinion: In online bridge you should consider every bid you make as agreed upon, even if you are not quite sure that partner understands it. You should alert if there is the possibility that opps may not understand any important aspect of the bid. There is no disadvantage with an alert in online bridge, as your partner does not see the alert. If opps consider the alert as superfuous, they will hardly ever complain but simply ignore it. Karl

I would bid 3nt, as I doubt it is a good idea to go for slam with a misfit hand. And it is the only chance to declare a diamond stopper. Karl