ThomasRush

The BBO system is not so far off the ACBL system, at least up through a BBO 10. The ACBL system has lots of ranks up to reaching Life Master -- and then 750, 1000, 1500, 2500, 3500, 5000, 7500, and 10,000. Note that the point differences keep getting bigger, and the gold points required increases proportionately. In the end, you'll find that your rank -- whether ACBL or BBO -- is useless, really. It reflects more on how much you play and as much on your partner's skill as on your own. The yardstick you should use is a combination of, "Am I learning? Do I do better on hands that would have flummoxed me last year?" and, "Am I enjoying myself more?" Remember that both BBO points and ACBL Masterpoints are cumulative tallies. You can play 20 games a day and rack up points fast, or you can play a game a day for 30 years and rack up points slowly. Either way, you might come to, say, an impressive 3,000 points. But are you more skilled than someone who has played for ten years in a few face-to-face ACBL tournaments a year, and accumulated 1,000 points? That said, there is a better measure of skill out there, a system called BridgePowerRatings developed by Chris Champion. The numbers took a real hit with cancellation of tournaments during the first Covid years, but he's now got some online ratings available. See https://www.bridgepowerratings.com/

Don't forget the Bridge Master hands, which go from beginner to world class play of the hand problems. Here on BBO -- From bridgebase.com, log in, go to Practice, then Bridge Master. Hours of good learning!

Two things to do. First, in BBO, History tab, you can look at 'recent tournaments' and see tournaments that are completed. For daylong tournaments, this means you have to wait until the next day; they don't want hands being published where people can see them before they've had a chance to play them. Second, and again for completed tournaments, in your browser, go to www.bridgebase.com. You'll see across the top of the screen the logo, Home, Vugraph, Hand Records, and BBO Points. Click on hand records, log in with your name and password, and you can look up games you've played going back at least a month, depending on how you manipulate the search criteria. You can also look up other peoples' scores this way. Playing with someone who's supposedly an "expert", but you wonder? If you look up their results and find they on average lose IMPs every match they play, they're probably not the expert they say they are. :)

One thing you need to think about is this general principle: "If game is assured, we make a forcing bid or bid game If no game is possible, we stop in the first playable partscore If game is possible, we make an invitational bid" If you're playing Standard American other systems where a 1NT bid by responder is not forcing, the 1NT bid is 6-9 points and is not forcing. Over a minor, it's most often a fairly balanced hand. Add 9 (partner's max) to your 13 HCP and you get to 23, there's no chance for game, so stop in the first playable partscore -- if your hand is also fairly balanced, that will be 1NT. If you have some significant distribution (5-4 of better in the minors with a singleton in a major, or a six-card or longer minor), then you'll bid 2C with the first or rebid your six-card minor with the one-suited hand. In the case when you open one of a suit and partner makes a non-jump 2/1 bid (say, 1H - 2C), partner has announced a hand of at least 10 points, and may have all the high cards you don't have (his hand is unlimited), so his bid is forcing, you must bid. In addition, if you or partner are just a bit above your minimums, then you're in the 25 combined HCP range, and likely have a game, so you shouldn't want to pass! Make the most natural rebid with your hand, which generally will look like this (in order of most to least important): - Rebid your six-card or longer major - support responder's suit with 4 or more cards in it - bid a new 4-card suit if unbalanced - rebid 2NT (minimum) or 3NT (15+) with a balanced hand and good stoppers in the unbid suits It sounds like you're just getting in to bridge. It can be useful to read a book that will help give you the big picture instead of picking up incomplete bits and pieces (and making lots of mistakes in the process). If you want to learn 2/1 I can recommend Max Hardy's "green book", 'Standard Bridge Bidding in the 21st Century". It will give you a solid foundation for modern bidding in what's called a "Two over one game forcing" system that's easy for newer players to master, and quite commonly played in North America. If you're just playing social bridge, you might want to learn Standard American instead (see Audrey Grant's books, for instance, or many others). in England, you might learn Acol, in France SEF, in China, Precision is pretty common for duplicate and tournament players. You might also find a local bridge club that has lessons for relatively new players. This can be a great way to learn -- and to find a compatible partner who's at a similar skill level to you. In any case, welcome to bridge; it's such a fascinating game that can give you a lifetime of opportunities to challenge yourself, as well as opportunities to interact with truly interesting people.

What a great idea both of these are!

Thank you for the information. I'll look forward to playing in the Sunday game... and hope it grows into a pairs alternative on other nights as well.

A bit of a pain of a solution, but if you go into a problem and start it but don't solve it, it will be marked as wrong. At least you could do this (would take only 2-3 minutes) and know which ones you'd solved this time through. As another poster points out, a new login will show them all as not done.

Not everyone has those mice, nor the skill to execute programming their mouse. This is a valid suggestion for a great enhancement to the BBO User Interface (UI). There are lots of things they could do in a browser to make BBO more friendly.

I like that idea a lot.

Good info!

I use a windows desktop most often, and sometimes get kicked out of BBO for no reason I can determine. I suppose you might try clearing your browser cache and closing tabs you're not actively using before going in to BBO; it might help.

Matchpoints aren't stupid, they're very good at doing what they're designed to do, and very bad at doing other things. What are they good at? - recognizing lifetime achievement - Keeping people playing in (especially) tournaments to get the next (or next significant) rank - Getting a certain group of people interested in the Masterpoint races (Ace of Clubs, Mini-McKinney, and Barry Crane Top 500) - Recognizing small steps in a player's Masterpoint accumulation What are they bad at? - serving as a benchmark for an individual's skill level (especially recent play level vs. lifetime accumulation) - Separating out your success based on your skill from the skill of your partner(s) Yes, I'd love to have something to tell people my current skill level. PowerRatings was a good shot at this ( https://www.bridgepowerratings.com/ )_but since Covid he's not been able to get the kind of information he used to have. Maybe the opening of tournaments will bring it back to life.

Either player can edit the card once it's been shared. Just do take care that you're not both trying to edit at the same time. Otherwise, one person's edits may overwrite the other's. I find it works best when you're on the phone together, and one person is making all the (agreed) changes.

For those still wondering -- it's an intermediate hand; if you didn't get it right, I strongly encourage you to work through the Bridge Master hands under "Practice" on BBO -- you'll learn many useful techniques to expand your declarer's toolbox. This hand seems to have only 10 tricks. Four hearts (after we knock out the heart A), a diamond, a spade since they were nice enough to set up our king, and four clubs -- 4+1+1+4). Where can we get two more tricks? If hearts were 2-2, it would be easy; draw two rounds of trump, play four rounds of clubs pitching dummy's two diamond losers, and then ruff two diamonds with dummy's two remaining trump. But hearts will only be 2-2 about 40% of the time. Can't you come up with a better line? Note: When hearts are 3-1, we cannot afford to draw all trump, because that only gives us 11 tricks, even with ruffing a diamond in dummy (assumes draw trump, play four rounds of clubs pitching two diamonds, then ruff one diamond in dummy, but that's dummy's last trump, we'll have a diamond loser still). You can't afford to play four rounds of clubs before you draw trump, as somebody's going to ruff that 4th club. And the answer is that you can find a better line; it's a simple dummy reversal. We're going to ruff *three* losing spades in our hand, and use dummy's trump to draw trump. Some things to think about: This would be a bit risky if LHO had not shown a six-card spade suit; LHO might be short in spades and over-ruff us if we're not careful. Here, he's shown length in spades, so we are confident he's not going to overruff even the 4th round of spades. We might have to overruff RHO, though. So let's ruff the spade ace low and play one round of trump, say the king from our hand. If RHO wins and continues a heart, we still have two trump in hand for spade ruffs, and enough entries to get to dummy (win the second heart in dummy, lead a low spade and ruff as low as you can; lead a diamond to dummy's ace and ruff dummy's last low spade. A club to the queen lets you draw trump (pitching your two losing diamonds), cash the spade K (pitch another diamond), play a club to the AKJ to pitch _dummy's_ low diamonds). If RHO leads something else after winning the heart ace, you can win in dummy and ruff two more spades in hand. Then get to dummy, draw trump, and proceed as above. This is a classic Dummy Reversal -- you ruff enough times in the long trump hand to the other hand longer in trump, and then use what had been the short trump hand to draw the final trump. On this hand, it lets you count up tricks like this (not in play order!): Three ruffs in hand (South), three trump in dummy (used to draw trump), four clubs, Diamond A, and Spade K - 3 + 3 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 12. Dummy reversals are a great tool; look for them when dummy's trump are good enough to be able to draw the opponents' trumps (a dummy reversal wouldn't have worked here if you held KQJTx of hearts, and dummy held, say, 8743, because ruffing with the x, T, J of hearts would promote the opponents' A98x (where one held A8x or A9x) to a second trump winner). If you were paying attention above, you might have seen the magic of a dummy reversal. We got to ruff spades with our trump in hand, then pitch diamonds from our hand on dummy's trump, then pitch diamonds from dummy on our hand's clubs, and lastly ruff a diamond with dummy's last trump. Here, a dummy reversal was a way to get six trump tricks from our five-card suit, instead of just four trump tricks with standard play.

What is it called? Certain convention cards appear under "Stock Cards" and represent ACBL SAYC, 2/1, and Acol systems. You might also have a "Your Favorite Convention Card" under Personal Cards; I recommend you keep that card filled out with a simple version of your preferred system card, so you can offer it to a new or pickup partner and have a basic understanding between the two of you.

The heart 8 doesn't show up on the first round of hearts.

This is a fun hand from the recent Reno Nationals. You hold !S: --- !H: KJ932 !D: Q543 !C: AKJ7 You deal and find your hand worth a 1!H bid. The first round proceeds: 1!H - (2!S) - 3!D - (3!S) What now? I'm a little excited about the 3!D bid, and decide on a 4!S rebid. 4!S - (P) - 4N - (P) Well, it's the 40th board you've played with this partner, you don't know, but assume 4NT is key-card asking. Taking the low road, you respond 5!D (3014): 5!D - (P) - 5!H - (P) Oh, heck, what's that? Queen ask? I've got it, and the king of clubs, so ... 6!C - (P) - 6!H - (P) Gads. Maybe P was trying to get to hearts all this time? Guess it's time to pass... :( and hope it's not too bad. P - (P) The !SA comes out from LHO's hand, and dummy is revealed (your hand repeated for your convenience): !S: K953 !H: QT76 !D: AT7 !C: Q6 !S: --- !H: KJ932 !D: Q743 !C: AKJ7 OK, bucky, how are you going to come to 12 tricks? (So as to not spoil it for others, please send me a personal email on BBO ("ThomasRush") and I'll summarize the results in a few days, giving people credit for correct solutions) Things you might want to know: !H are 3-1; if you lead a heart to the queen, RHO wins the ace and returns a spade. There aren't any weird suit splits; each opponent has at least two diamonds and at least two clubs. LHO's 2!S bid was a 'standard' preemptive jump overcall (like a weak 2 bid, if that helps). Yeah, so Partner should probably cuebid 3!S (Limit raise or better) instead of the rather unusual 3!D call... but then you might not have gotten to slam, so "God bless you, partner (if I make it)." I'd call this an intermediate play of the hand problem. You should be able to develop a plan for 12 tricks at trick 1.

Those looking for partners should also consider using the partnership desk at bridgewinners.com . Registration is free, and there are a lot of people serious about bridge at all levels of skill.

Those looking for partners should also consider using the partnership desk at bridgewinners.com . Registration is free, and there are a lot of people serious about bridge at all levels of skill.

"2/1" is a system very common amongst players in the ACBL. It's read "Two over one", and is short for "Two over one game forcing" -- that is, after an opening of one of a suit, responder's non-jump bid at the 2-level (Say, 1!H - 2!C) sets a game force. The cornerstone of the system is that responder's 1NT response to opener's 1!H or 1!S bid is artificial and forcing one round, with a range of 6 to a bad 12 HCP (possibly a bit more if you open light). A number of other tools are almost universally used by 2/1 players, such as New Minor Forcing, Jacoby 2NT response to major suit openings, and 4th suit forcing. Setting a game force early with a 2/1 game-forcing response allows you to have very accurate game and slam bidding, at the expense of somewhat less-accurate partscore bidding. In my experience, it also helps many less-than-expert players do a lot less guessing. It also removes some of the ethical challenges players used to have -- where a long pause before raising partner's major to 3 on an auction like 1S - 2C; 2S - 3S might show a hand you didn't want partner to pass short of game, while a quick 3S bid would be "I'm only bidding because I promised a second bid" (ugh!). Max Hardy wrote a pair of nice books, "Standard Bidding for the 21st Century" and "Advanced Bidding for the 21st Century" that lay out one of the popular variants if you choose to learn more about it.

The pair with the higher masterpoints almost certainly had a higher score, and placed in the overalls. You see this fairly often. Also note that a pair can win 1st overall in the B strat and win more masterpoints than an A pair that has a higher score (because the A pair was lower in the overall rankings, and perhaps only had a section place, not an overall place). I agree this can be confusing.

When you create the table, you can assign a person to each seat, and they get an invite when you start the table. If you know who you want sitting where, that's usually easiest. Thomas.

Also note that for individuals, you can issue a "group challenge" and have everyone play the same eight or whatever boards. Competitive, Challenges, Group Challenge.

From the main BBO screen, "competitive", then "team matches", then the "Create Team Match" button. There are three screens then, one for description, one for options (number of boards, form of scoring, kibitzer options), and the last for listing the team members. Note that "team 1" should be the people who will be playing N/S at table 1, and E/W at table 2. Make sure you type in user names correctly. T

Settings persist on my Windows machine for each browser I use across reboots and reloads, regardless of which browser I'm using (I use Chrome, Avast, and Edge, depending). If I change something in Chrome, I do need to change it in Avast and Edge also... but once changed, it 'sticks'.