HeavyDluxe

Hi, BBO. Unlike most people, I actually like the new HTML interface, so I'm not here to grumble. :) But, I did want to raise a bug... Since the last upgrade, I've had a resizing issue when attempting to view profiles. I kibitz A LOT and click down through the list of players I've followed to figure out where I want to go (and whether I am allowed to go there). Recently, some of the profiles run off the bottom of the screen and lead to a white bar at the bottom. I can get rid of it, I've found, by doing any serious web browser resizing task (full screen to not and back, or hide/show address bar, etc). Otherwise, it just blanks part of the screenspace out and looks bad. If you don't correct it, a subsequent profile view can exacerbate the problem and make the whitespace larger. Never seems to get any bigger after that. If you want to message me on BBO with a delivery address, I can send a screen shot... It's happening in Chrome/Firefox on my MBP and on Chrome on a Pixelbook I have, so it seems baked in. Also, just because, I'd love to highlight these two niggles from the past that seem to persist. :) https://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/81368-kibitzing-quirks-html5/ Thanks!!

I do wish that, instead of just flipping the names, they'd rotate hands when I'm declaring from the Robot's seat. That is, make the robot/declaring hand south when I'm playing. BUT, they DO flip the names. So, I don't really know what people are complaining about. They already do mark which hand is declaring (it's marked with the name of the player playing the hand) and which is dummy (Robot). Perhaps not the clear-est indicators, but clear enough that I think doing more would be too much. Again, I'd prefer that they swap hands/rotate the table instead of simply moving my name to NORTH when they 'switch seats' for me. But, it's not like there isn't an indication of which hand is declaring.

Assuming strong NT and normal-ish agreements (or not discussed), this is a 2NT bid IMO.

I think we, as bridge players, need to consider getting a little less 'gatekeep-y' over what is 'real bridge' if we want the game to survive. If this should be ANYTHING other than just a 'BBO works like this', then it should be a table, tournament, or match setting. Casual, beginner games can leverage the more 'open' settings and competitive tables/games can go whole hog.

Right now, the only benefit of the Prime 'area' is the ability for people in Prime to use the Advanced Robots for free. I think that's a pretty good benefit, mind you. But there's no other reason to START a table in the Prime area other than to put a filter on the available players. And given that there's nothing else (or little else) drawing people into the Prime club right now, filling an empty table is a painstakingly slow process. So, I'm doing the same thing.

Sorry... You're right, of course. I was being imprecise in an attempt to make a different point, though. I was trying to say that, sitting south at a random table, I wouldn't expect to have the 'best hand' 8 deals in a row. So, it's a little disingenuous to complain about non-standard distributions (of cards, hcps, or whatever else) in a tournament whose foundation principle is a manipulation of HCP to benefit one particular player.

So, a couple things... First, this is not a sufficient sample size to prove anything. Second, remember that, if the format is 'best hand' or anything like that, it stands to reason that things would be less evenly distributed than normal. After all, no random deal sets would have you end up with the best hand. More to the point, IMO, the other players against whom you're comparing are dealing with the same hands, suit divisions, and other challenges. One of the great things with duplicate is that the variance is norm'd out between comparing players. So, what does it matter if the suit divisions are abnormal? If you're right and they're abnormally so, plan around it and watch your scores go up against the field since they're playing for more 'random' breaks.

Such a showoff... ;) Congratulations, Phil! More impressive than the feats of skill are the way so many are hurrying to congratulate him. Nice to see the 'good guys' winning. :)

I think this is already there. Click the DECLARER's name and a small menu should pop up that includes KIBITZ.

If you're looking at the hand in the bottom panel of the HISTORY tab, you can click the 'patties' menu in the top-right and select SHOW DOUBLE DUMMY.

Well, in that case, the weekly free is likely still running. For example, Hollands played _this_ week's free tournament last night. Since the same deals run through the end of the week, they're hidden until the new deals are rolled in.

You can get these already through the hand record services BBO provides. Your tournaments show up under HISTORY in BBO. Anyones hands can be searched here: https://www.bridgebase.com/myhands/index.php?&from_login=0 Not easy to filter for JUST the bot tourneys, but....

Interface change is hard. I think both the Flash and current version are fine enough, each with their strengths/weaknesses. I appreciate the browser and mobile-centric design of the newest client since I think more and more people will be on non-desktop screens in the future. IMO, the value proposition here (what we get for what we pay) is so good as to make any other little quibbles insignificant.

So, up front, these are super minor things but figured people might want to know. Running on primarily on a Pixelbook (ChromeOS with Chrome) but can duplicate the same thing on my Macbook Pro (Catalina/Chrome) as well. 1) Let's say you want to 'kibitz East' to look over someone's shoulder. An auction happens and West is declarer. On the old clients, you could see declarer's (partner's) hand when the opening lead hit the table. That would let you, in essence, plan the play along with declarer, kibitz the hand from declarer's perspective, and then return to seeing East only when the next hand was dealt. In the web client, declarer's hand isn't becoming visible until the play to trick 1 makes it all the way to declarer's hand. I'm guessing this is either some anti-cheating thing - though that doesn't make a lot of sense - or some minor bug. 2) On small-screened clients, the 'right-click' menu for clicking on player at a table isn't very 'smart'. That is, if I right-click on south to kibitz their hand only, it can be the case that a substantial portion of the pop-up menu runs off screen. To kibitz south, I might have to 'kibitz east' first to shift south around at the table and then I can access the full menu on their username. It isn't that there's too little screen to draw the menu, really. It's just that it draws from the user's name/seat DOWN rather than from the window/screen border UP. Just a couple quibblies that I've bumped into that I thought I'd raise... Certainly nothing terrible, and probably something that has negative consequences I'm not thinking of were they implemented differently. Still, here they are. :) Thanks for the service you all provide to us!

People who don't work in programming assume that it should be relatively easy to do something like this in the Bridgebase application: load (argine) insert (argine) where = (gib) delete (gib) It's rarely the case that you can just plug/play or merge code from different applications or developers. I hadn't heard of the merger (that's an interesting tidbit), but it's not surprising to me that it would take a year or more to figure out the strategy around both products and longer to execute on merging them. I'm sure Funbridge and BBO both do/did fine, but I'm still guessing they don't employ hoardes of coders who can just take on a retrofit project out of the blue.

It is possible to open multiple, authenticated BBO sessions using different browsers, or different devices. If you're wanting to disable cheating, turning off the anonymous kibitz accomplishes nearly nothing. If you want to prevent cheating, disallow kibitzing at your table. Otherwise, I'm all in favor of the anonymous, 'just watch' functionality. I've used it to expose people to the game during major tournaments or when there's a particularly good table on.

I don't know whether they were or weren't, but I'm not so sure there _aren't_ people who would do bizarre things to win. I'll grant that it's an order of magnitude different, but there are people who go to great lengths to cheat on free, non-League'd tournaments on BBO. And all they get for their success there is a little number next to their name on a free bridge site. Hardly the acclaim one would think incite someone to underhanded conduct. I agree that it's an absurd idea that someone would take pride in that... but, I'm not sure there aren't people who would. FWIW, I think it's interesting both because of the interesting implications of gender divisions in bridge and because of the odd blend of people who play our game - making it both highly progressive on one hand and oddly conservative on another. But, I understand how that could be seen as poking an sensitive issue with a sharp stick under the guise of 'curiosity'.

You can't customize the sounds, but you can turn them off in ACCOUNT->SETTINGS. There's no way to adjust the playing speed of the Robots, as far as I know.

This isn't really a BBO issue... If you put your cursor in the chat box and enable whatever chat-to-text features you normally use for voice typing, it should work.

I think 4♠ is too much, especially unfavorable opposite a hand that couldn't move over the preempt and with a RHO who's taking somewhat unilateral, strong action. As to whether EW should continue, I don't know where W could possibly bid on and I don't think E can know when 5♥ is right. I think expecting them to push to the 5-level is a little unreasonable.

If you mean kicked out of a TABLE (hand/game): Yeah, it happens. The table 'owner' can remove players more or less at will. If you mean the webapp is crashing, it's almost certainly a probably with your browser on your computer. Dump the cache, history, and other stuff and then try logging in again.

I'm olde fashioned... Longest suit first. 2♣ now, followed by spades.

Serious reply: There were a half-dozen of us that were being mentored by an older player. We were all in a similar life stage, so we were online constantly together. "Time and togetherness" makes some groups groupier. Oh... ... and that. :)

That's about it... Agreements and style matter. That said, the groupiest group of people I played with consistently played 2♣ as all 22+ or any 'distributional within a trick-ish of game in your best suit'.

Just one other 'glitch' to note for your log... For me, at least, the individual volume 'mixers' for multiple voice commentators didn't work. I could slide the sliders, but the relative volume of the audio in both feeds stayed the same. Small thing, but thought you'd want to know. Latest version of Chrome running on a fully updated Pixelbook... Happy to provide details.