onoway

Both hands we objected to happened within the first half dozen hands we played vs this pair. The very first hand started out with an unalerted 1NT bid in response to his partners 1♠ opening. They ended up in ♠ and when dummy went down it had opening values and 7♠2-2-2 distribution. This was the (unalerted) agreement between the pair, and they offered to redeal when we protested. Which we did. The next hand (which was given above) was hand 5, if I remember. This was not just casual play, it was part of a scheduled series of matches but no TD was around. I refused to continue until we could play with a TD available. We had a number of kibs,(including precision players), some of whom told me later that they wondered if the pair were cheating because the bidding was so strange. When the hand was offered to a TD, we were told that everything was fine, "it was just a bad bid". My p quit playing and now I play only with a few friends. An occassional psyche is one thing, but to deliberately mislead in one hand and then psyche in another a couple of hands later is not bridge, imo, it's psychological warfare and I want no part of it. Perhaps at the top levels this is fine,or to be expected, but most of us, even if we play competitive bridge as best we can, are here to enjoy the game, win or lose. At any point past the first hand, this was not enjoyable or fun in any way. I used to pay to play in the Homebase Tourneys and get smeared so regularly that it counted a victory if I didnt come in last. They were highly educational. This was not, except in that now I know pairs can behave badly and it's allowed. I won't ever again suggest that anyone play duplicate bridge, not only because this experience was so intensely unpleasant, but mostly because the opp's behaviour is perfectly fine within duplicate bridge rules.

One question: if you are looking to have people use less petroleum products and you want money to support R & D into alternative sources of energy, why not start by removing ALL subsidies to the oil and gas industry? The taxpayers would then not have to pay any new taxes and the money given to the oil companies (or not now collected in tax revenues) would then be available for other projects. The price of fuel would go up (the oil companies aren't going to give up their many millions of $ per year profit margins without a fight) so consumption would go down. There are some who suggest that without the taxpayer subsidies to the oil industries, alternative energies would be far more cost competitive than they now seem to be.

well. If I come to play bridge and find out that what is being played is poker masquerading as bridge, I am going to be a) extremely annoyed and b) I am going to stop playing with people who play like that. No big deal as I am not even a minor player in the scheme of things, but when people bemoan the difficulty of getting people to play the game, this strikes me as a perfect example of why. Obviously having expert on profile means not a damn thing, except that then I am not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. If he had self identified as novice, then I would not have been annoyed, although a bit sceptical as their system is a unique and extremely complicated version of Precision. Also obviously, I am not entitled to information the partner doesn't have. Equally obviously (to me) the opps are not supposed to lie about what their bids mean or what is the point of demanding alerts? A mistake is one thing, deliberately doing so quite another, and strikes me as very close to cheating, especially when it appears to be a pattern for the pair.This sort of "oops, just a bad bid, ha ha " happened twice in fewer than 6 hands from this pair. Neither "bad bid" funnilly enough, could possibly have had a negative effect for them. How in the world can you penalize the opps for ANYTHING misleading that they do? They can always say, "oh well, it was just a bad bid and I rescued it." It's total BS imo. I have played off and on since I was about 5 whenever I lived somewhere anyone played bridge.I was absolutely delighted that BBO allowed me to find partners and get back into it, as I live in a somewhat remote area. This event and others like it have me seriously starting to look for another game, since it appears that this is acceptable behaviour now at the bridge table. Poker has never been of interest. If I want random results based on insufficient or misleading information I go to the horse races.

Ok I am bewildered here. I realize this is geared toward f2f play and my question refers to an event on BBO but hope you will clarify anyway. The other day a pair playing an esoteric system were consistently alerting bids in a way unrelated to what was actually in their hands. For example, bidding goes 1♠2♣Double. When asked, the double was explained as negative. When the dummy went down, the "negative" double hand had opening values and included the KQJx ♠ The doubling player had éxpert' on his profile, so when someone later explained this was "just a bad bid" I got a little hostile. However, from what I can gather here, the bid was perfectly fine because the partner would also think it was denying ♠? Is it really true that it is fine to lie to opps when your system allows you to force your partner to continue bidding so you can eventually decide the contract no matter what your partner thinks you have in your hand? If this is true, I am beginning to understand why people lose interest in playing the game. What, then, is the point of alerting at all? It simply turns into a tactic to undermine the truth of the bidding. Whatever happened to "bridge is the only game where you tell your opps what you have and challenge them to do something about it?"

Stats say we pay less, live longer and have lower infant mortality. We have to wait longer for some procedures, very true, at least in comparison to that percentage of Americans who have adequate insurance... but nobody here ever has to choose between selling their house or getting medical help. And of course for the large percentage of those Americans who have inadequate or no coverage there is no comparison, as a longer wait time is preferable to never. Far from perfect but far far better than the alternative. As far as the ad goes... In my (very limited) experience such ads tend to reflect a company that wants to keep all its options open and can be a very difficult outfit to work for because of that mindset. Of course, they might just be in a bind and therefore went with the fastest and easiest route, too. Very best of luck to you and your family, Phil.

Is there any relatively quick/easy way to exclude players? I have noticed for the memorial tourney today for Bob Holmes there are clearly a whole bunch of people who are ignoring the pleas to register only if a friend or student. Is there any way to bounce gatecrashers?

There is more to rainfall patterns than temperature. It has been shown by various people around the world that the vegetation patterns have an effect; thus Willie Smits in Borneo has demonstrated that as his work encouraged a healthier diversity/abundance of trees and plants, the rainfall increased back toward traditional amounts and the aquifer which had been consistenly providing less and less water for the major city miles and miles away was being replenished. Greg Judy is a cattleman in the US who has brought farms abandoned for lack of water and worn out unproductive soil back into productivity, including finding long gone creeks coming back into flow, only by organizing the grazing patterns of his cattle in very specific ways. Sepp Holtzer has restored dried up lakes to health. The same principles are used by Geoff Lawton (Greening the Desert)of the Permaculture Insitute of Australia and many others all around the world in managing to restore land which has given up the ghost and become barren and unproductive. The terrible drought of the 30's was as disastrous in Saskatchewan as it was in Oklahoma, aand finally the soil was stabilized with grasses and then trees, and thousands of acres have been maintained since then as permanent community pastures to prevent that from ever happening again. (A program the federal government has now decided to abandon since they can realize some income by selling the land.) All of these things are accomplished by correcting the effects of bad management by people, by returning to an understanding of the natural patterns and interactions between what happens to the land and the weather and following the principles of those patterns. Another man in India whose name I forget did the same thing with land considered to be sterile which had three wells all which had been dry for some time. He did a little with it whenever he had some spare time, starting with bringing pebbles in to put around the base of the few plants he could grow so whatever moisture was there couldn't evaporate. Over time he was so successful that he was eventually offered big money to sell the formerly barren land for a resort as it had become such a beautiful lush area.(and the wells had all begun to flow again.) All these charts and such are interesting but it's perhaps more interesting that a number of people who are too busy fixing things to engage in endless academic debate are apparently under the radar of the academics and scientists. The other day I watched a video of a scientist who was pontificating about how we needed to find ways to deal with desertification quickly, as it was a fate looming ever closer with climate change. It astonished and dismayed me that someone in his position should APPARENTLY be so entirely unaware of what has already been shown to work extremely well to solve the problem. Perhaps a big part of the studied avoidance of these solutions is that they depend on paying attention rather than money, of working with natural systems rather than trying to enforce our will on them, and that the solutions never will depend upon (and therefore provide an income source for) multinationals. In a side note..It is perhaps noteworthy that when farmers in India changed to genetically modified seed, over time they noticed that the water table was falling drastically to the point they were having to dig deeper wells every few years. This was presumably because of the increased need for water if only to mix the chemicals upon which these crops generally depend. The problem became so acute that many (over 600) comitted suicide when their formerly productive lands became barren when they could no longer afford to do so as the water table had dropped so low. Now a very large area of India is designated as GMO free..and slowly the aquifer is replenishing itself. Almost all the industrial agriculture corn in the US is now GMO corn. Combine a lower rainfall than expected with a monocrop having higher than normal water requirements and soil which is so manipulated that it has no resilience left and you have a problem in the making.

I wish I could find a version of this without the crowd noise but even so still get goose bumps every time I listen to it.

Not sure if this is the place, but there will be a memorial tourney for friends and students of Bob Holmes on Thursday. Tournament #3616 July 26 at 11 AM EST Indy 8 boards.

Condolences Winston. It's been a very sad time for you lately. Bob was one of the first teachers I met on BBO and he was immensely helpful and supportive to me and many many others finding our way through the maze of duplicate bridge. He was always ready and willing to help anyone who was truly trying to learn. He is missed.

Thanks .... some...although I checked the bids at the time...hindsight helps. I knew right away I had blown the response in any number of ways when I raised ♣.I play DONT and hadn't remembered GIBS play Capp) but no undos. I still dont understand why GIB would bid 3♥ instead of bidding its 6 card ♠suit tho. We neither of us have claimed to have♦covered for NT. (Also this is looking like a more than 40 point deck from the bidding..my fault!..that might be too much to expect the GIBS to think about though.)

Someone sent me a video yesterday with some (self identified) economist suggesting a very complicated scenario where Romney doesn't win on the first ballot and then everyone switches their second ballot vote to Ron Paul. He said Ron Paul had not officially withdrawn from the race, just said he is no longer campaigning.(?!?) As someone mentioned above, American politics are quite fascinating. Is Ron Paul ending up as Republican candidate actually possible?

Question is; why would North bid 3♥ and then why would it X rather than bid its 6 card ♠ suit? What was it expecting from me, what was I supposed to do over the X, how am I supposed to know it has ♠ and even if I DID, what possible advantage would there be to having a ♠ contract played from south? The 4♥ bid totally confused me and I just said "a pox on all your houses" but of course that doesn't work well. B-) [hv=pc=n&s=sj32h64dqjt4cq532&w=s976ha7da62cakj87&n=saqt854hkq8d973c6&e=skhjt9532dk85ct94&d=w&v=0&b=8&a=1n2c2d3cp3h4hppdppp]399|300|I forgot that GIBS play Capp so the 3♣ bid was a DONT raise. No doubt this contributed to the problem, but the question remains, why not bid the ♠suit [/hv]

Oh well then! I had not understood that the habit of preferring hamburgers to tacos was more significant in determining definition than the fact that although we both are supposedly democracies, democracy is manifest though totally different political systems. Of course, you regularly eat poutine and saskatoons, (though not together), speak both official languages (English and French), suffer no delusions about universal health care involving "death squads", and had no banks deliberately free falling on citizens who then got the bill for cleaning up the mess. oh.just a minute.... Sorry, but to say Canadians are Americans is ignorant. You have company though, a couple of years ago a US Senator indignantly declared that Canada was "UnAmerican!" for something we did. Unsatisfactory as our education system often is, I believe that most Canadians, and all our politicians, understand that there is a border and a DIFFERENT country on the other side of it. What a concept. Call us "North Americans" and I have no dispute with you. Just "Americans" means something entirely different.

I used to have a travel book published in 1908 which confidently stated that it was only a matter of time before Canada became one of the United States. However, speaking as a Canuck, and regardless of the esteem I have for many Americans individually, I do not consider myself even remotely an American and indeed will correct anyone who refers to me as such. We are not "Americans" even if we live in the Americas because common usage of the term specifically refers to citizens of the United States of America. It's just being cute to pretend otherwise. It may be that anthropologists refer to the Americas but that has as little in common with what is GENERALLY understood today as a $2 bill in Canada. Still legal tender, but definitely a curiosity which likely wouldn't even be recognized or accepted as such by most people. In common conversation nobody refers to citizens of Mexico as Americans, and the people living on and patrolling the US side of the Rio Grande, or paying for building the border fence, would think you were certifiable to do so. It used to be common for Americans to use Canadian flags and such on their backpacks or luggage when travelling so they wouldn't be casually identified as Americans. So although it might be pedantically accurate to say that Mexicans and Canadians are Americans, it certainly isn't correct in any other sense.

Is there any data on how long it normally takes for a board to be played 16 times and is there a difference between IMPs and MPs? Specifically, what I am looking for is information on: if a match between two pairs is 18 hands, how long is it likely to be before all of those 18 hands have been played at 15 other tables? If the time likely to be different between MPs and IMPs, what would be a general average difference in the time and in which direction? I would assume that the hands would be played faster in IMPs but that's only an assumption. I also assume that the time varies depending on the number of people playing in BBO, but a general guideline would be hugely helpful. Thanks in advance for the help.

at partnership bidding table this hand came up ♠93 ♥10 ♦AQ7432♣ AT96 Partner opened 2nt. It seems as though 3nt may well be missing a slam but what to do? Play 4way transfers normally so usually nt>to ♦ but p will obviously pass 3nt. Bid 4♣? and then blackwood? Is there a chance p would think 4♣ was gerber (dont usually play it) or saying choose a major? I know some people who would likely just blast to 6♦ but ... What is the best way to tackle this?

NASA says that we are overdue for a magnetic pole shift. Not everyone agrees, it's been a LONG time since there was one, but apparently it isn't on a regular schedule. There's a bunch of stuff out there about what a pole shift would mean but it ranges from "not really anything we will even notice" through a degree of difficulty " it will be accompanied with disruptions to satellites and electrical installations" to major catastrophe "we will fry" as one person eloquently put it, "because the ozone layer will disappear entirely for a number of years". (Then he says we can MAKE ozone easilly..Perhaps we just don't know how to make it stick around? He didn't explain that part.) It was interesting to learn that the magnetic north pole is gallopping toward Siberia at an ever increasing speed. When people started measuring it it was moving maybe inches a year and if I understood one site correctly it is now moving at something like 30 miles a year. And speeding up as it goes. ( I wasn't sure about believing this until a news`story a couple of weeks ago about planes in Florida being delayed because of needing to adjust their bits and bobs to the new location of the magentic pole.) Getting ready to swap ends maybe? Lots of people here who are educated in this space, according to the climate change thread, so I was wondering what their thoughts were.

A few years ago I was amused ( a bit depressed too) to see that someone looking for a traffic control person for road construction sites required a BA from any applicants to be considered. To stand by the side of the road and hold up stop and slow signs. Perhaps it's all part of the backlash against anything seen as smacking of "elitism" that university has largely become just a mill for grinding out "acceptable" workers. It was one thing when it used to be that some education indicated an ability to read and write, so it offered some perceptible value over those who could not. Now I have seen examples of people IN University who can barely do even that. They have been pushed through the system for one reason or another..sometimes because the teachers at lower levels know the student won't be able to get work without at least some university and they want him to have a chance to get out of the poverty he was raised in. Unquestionably there are other reasons as well. But it makes a university education a mockery of what it was intended to be, which in some ways IS elitist, in that it should only be appropriate for a percentage of the population. The only elitist groups now acceptable seem to be the film and music celebrities, or the very rich. So it's likely many more people would be able to reel off every milestone in Lady Gaga's life than would have a clue who Richard Dawkins is for example. Perhaps universities need to stop giving out degrees. Of course, most universities if not all would promptly go out of business if they did that.

This may well be something I should know but ..I don't. Playing with GIBS, vul vs not, bidding goes Pass Pass(me) pass, Gib partner bids 1nt. I have ♠873 ♥A9732 ♦Q9 and ♣10 73 So I transferred to ♥ and GIBS bounces to 2nt, informing me this is a superaccept. What am I supposed to do with it? I really don't have the values fo bid again, and if I bid ♥ then the contract will be wrongsided, which is what transfers are supposed to avoid. I am assuming I have to bid 3♥ here but wanted to know if there was a better bid (like pass:)) I thought superaccepts were a level higher (GIB would have bid 3♥)

If these are the formative years then what message is this teaching? That it's ok to target and do nasty things to people just because they belong to a certain age group? Wasn't there a movie a few years back about anyone over the age of 60 or so being considered a drag on society and therefor should be "put down?" (or recycled or something... I heard about it but didnt see it.) It's only a rational (if extreme) extension of this. Various wars have amply demonstrated how easy it is to promote the targetting of whatever group, to the point of genocide. Is this being ok the message we want to instill in youngsters?

If an adult who may not even know about the device is with a child the child will be hurt but the adult who is responsible for the child being there won't feel a thing, but that's ok with you? You see nothing wrong in a device which will not affect an adult who might be raping and/or murdering someone and who will go unpunished unless caught, but it WILL automatically punish a youngster who is simply travelling from a to b, the only criteria being they are young? You don't see anything inherently unjust about this? The more I think about this, the more I start to think about such things as people being forced to wear the Star of David and such like. Many simple/easy solutions turn out to be not quite so simple after all, and this now seems to me to be one of those which has unpleasant implications. Another thought on the practical side comes to mind. If adults who have "bad deeds" on their mind learn that kids will not be in an an area because of such a device, they may decide to frequent that area more often as they are less likely to be interrupted or disturbed by random teenagers.

It is apparently illegal for ANYONE to be in the school yard during those times...any adult could be dealing drugs or doing whatever else there and he or she will be punished only if caught. OTOH a kid taking a shortcut home to avoid being late and with no intention of doing anything else will be punished. It was unclear how far out into the street this goes and whether or not a teenager on the sidewalk beside the playground would be affected. It is perhaps noteworthy that all vandalism and litter was not stopped, only a good percentage of it, so clearly some adults are also using the playground during that time without any problems whatsoever. It is a selective technology. If it hurt everyone who was there illegally then it's more like the electric fence mentioned above, and some of the problems with its use go away.

This is true. However, an electric fence will affect anyone who touches it. The "Mosquito" will ONLY affect youngsters, it has no effect on adults who are doing "bad deeds". It will affect ALL youngsters, whether or not they are or have any intention of doing "bad deeds". It is a control targetting a certain demographic of society exclusively and impartially over that whole group, while being indifferent to the behaviour of anyone not in the target group. Imagine this being some sort of technology directed at another group..something which preemptively and exclusively harms women, or native Americans, or gays or any other demographic. Surely there would be an uproar?

There are a number of weird competitions such as these : http://chillopedia.com/interesting/top-10-most-bizarre-competitions-around-the-world/#axzz1umQBnnQm This one seems a tad weirder than most: worm calling. Each contestant gets a square meter of land and 15 minutes. At the end of that time the worms on the surface of the ground are counted. Any fluid used to draw the worms, must be personally sampled by the user in front of the organisers to ensure it won't do bad things to worms or ground (they dont seem to care about the people) but aside from that it seems pretty straightforward. One winner "called" well over 100 worms to his patch of ground within 15 minutes. Only in Britain....