Sigi_BC84

Brilliant observations, Fred (yet again). You should keep it mind, however, that the typical system freak so badly enjoys fiddling with the bids and conventions. Compare it to the computer hacker who simply enjoys Tweaking That Machine as an end in itself. I belong to both groups so I know what I'm talking about :-). I also often hear stories along the lines of "boy, could he play the cards, but his bidding was atrocious". This is the complement of the problem the system freaks have. Many people will never get appropriate results (matching their card playing abilities), because they refuse to improve their bidding methods. A good strategy is probably to start with a reasonably simple, but working, system and concentrate on technique, counting, etc. next for at least some years -- if you can resist system esoterica (that's a huge "if" for some of us). --Sigi (who, of course, does enjoy playing Raptor :-)

I second the recommendation of the WP club. Mostly US american and canadian players, so the WP main playing times should match yours (assuming you are from the US). There are hardly any dorks at all, and hardly any safe-labeled experts who miss that rating by a huge margin (compare this to the main bridge club, where 90% of the the players are "expert"). I've found it really easy to find a stable and friendly table in the WP club; also, many people there know eachother so you will find a good general atmosphere because of that. --Sigi

I echo earlier suggestions regarding mini-bridge.... They've come up with an easy way to eliminate bidding altogether. Thanks Richard ;-). Check this out: http://www.minibridge.co.uk/ (Minibridge at schools) and this: http://www.cacbf.com/MINIBRDG.htm This also looks good: http://www.ebu.co.uk/publications/Teaching...iBridge%201.pdf Mind you that there are special "coded" decks available, which allow you to deal prepared hands. This works by having arrows on the backs of the cards, pointing into the direction where the card has to be dealt (N, S, E or W). Every deck has a collection of 24 arrows on each back of the cards, making for 24 teaching hands per deck. There are several decks available for basic technique, bidding, etc. At the moment I can only find German retailers selling these. I don't know if you can get them in Oz or the US, but it would be a shame if not... René Steiner has made a tool with which you can print out sheets to make coded decks yourself out of deals you specify: http://www.trsteiner.de/bridge/en/magic.shtml I think this is an invaluable tool for the bridge teacher if you can't get pre-made minibridge decks. --Sigi

Terrible nerd pun: That AWT to SWING some people :D... Atul OMG Atul, please get some professional help :-). --Sigi

This is not the case! Reread what I have said about Minibridge above. Playing Minibridge is easy and can be taught to reasonable intelligent people withing a few hours. As soon as they know how to play the cards, you can start with scoring and bidding, the two complicated parts of the game (regarding rules and agreements, not technique!). Bidding should be kept simple at the beginning, improving later when there is a basic feel for what it is about. Of course one should not spend too much time with oversimplified systems as to not ingrain "bad" methods into the new player's mind. In my opinion one of the real struggles with Bridge is that it's hard to find a game. Compare it to chess: you only need one opponent, and a chessboard with pieces, which are to be found in about every household. To play Bridge, you need: a deck of cards (not the problem) FOUR people with agreements bidding boxes (by mouth is too hard for beginners I think) The main difficulty is to find enough players. Right now my flatmate is sitting in the kitchen, playing chess with a friend. Maybe they would want to play Bridge, if they knew the game, but there still was one person missing if I'd count myself into the equation (of course I would want to play ;-). Mind you that all four players need to know the game, as you can't simply introduce a fourth person to the rules if you are only three. This is a vicious circle: not enough players -> not many games -> not many opportunities to teach new players (or have people watch others play, thereby raising interest in the game) -> not enough players -> etc. Playing Chess, Go, or any other of these two player board games, you (as an individual) only need one interested person to get somebody knew into the game (potentially). Playing Bridge, you need three. --Sigi

This is the topic that Fred had in mind (probably): http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?showtopic=11517 I don't think there is any further need for discussion here. Fred makes some perfectly good points (I disagree in some details). In a way the second of my earlier assumptions (he doesn't want people to mess with the software) holds true -- I should have been more specific about this point, however. The entire business side of the issue is obvious and I don't have a problem with that. I think it's great that Fred earns good money and reputation with a free service. I also completely believe him when he says that one of his major motivations is his love of bridge and his enjoyment writing bridge software. The only thing that remains to be said (and it's actually a reiteration of something I said earlier): If there ever comes the time for a full rewrite of the software (a bad move from a business perspective BTW), by all means use Java. --Sigi

So did I (email Roy Kerr). No reply either... B) --Sigi

You seem like a smart guy, but I disagree with a lot of what you say. There are a lot of things about our company and the people who run it that you do not understand and you state some subjective opinions as if they were facts. I said "assumption", trying to make clear that I don't know the real reasons. Now I'm going to search the forums for finding out more. I understand that you won't argue anymore about this and I don't want to start a flame war (especially not with you, Fred). My apologies. --Sigi

I know the difference between "Linux", "Open Source", "free (as in beer)" and "free (as in speech)". Actually I find it quite tiresome to make these distinctions in every single post dealing with the "open/free software" topic, esp. if it's clear from the context what is meant. Regarding BBO on linux, read this: http://www.df7cb.de/projects/bbo-cedega/ I'm running VMWare to play on BBO which is the best way IMHO if you've got VMWare (which costs money). Now with the VMWare player, which is free (as in beer), there is actually a way to run BBO inside VMWare without paying -- if you've got a preconfigured VM with WindowsXP and BBO installed. (I haven't tried out VMWare player yet myself). --Sigi

Hi, since the entire population of relay bidders seems to be reading/posting here, my short question: Is "Bridge2Symmetric" to be released ever again (either commercially or free)? Is there any chance the author(s) might be talked into doing that? I think it's invaluable for learning relay bidding (and I'm sure anybody who has used it will agree with me). --Sigi

Hi, an incredibly effective tool for learning any symmetric relay structure is "Bridge2Symmetric", which is unfortunately not being sold anymore (nor is it open source). You can enter most kinds of relay structure (including several asking schemes for controls etc.) and then practice it both as relayer and relay responder. I have entered Moscito 2005 (worked really well after only a short time learning how the tool works) and also practiced it quite a lot. The tool generates hands (which you can constrain if you want to practice only certain hand types) and lets you bid/read them. It's also very easy to select a part of the relay structure and practice only that part. Unfortunately the only way to get hold of the tool is to stuble across somebody who is unethical enough to give it away... :( I'm still hoping that the original author(s) (I think it's Roy Kerr and maybe others) will finally release it for free or something. --Sigi

Splintering by bidding below shortness (so opps don't get an easy double for the lead). --Sigi

Hello, the relay bidders among you might know the software "Bridge2Symmetric", which is an excellent tool to practice symmetric relay systems (of any kind). What I'm planning to do is to write a converter that will turn b2s bidding trees into a full disclosure file, for easy creation of complete symmetric relay systems descriptions. If you did this by hand you'd grow both very old and insane, I'm sure. Interference and the like will be a problem, but at least you would have a description of non-competitive auctions. Maybe competitive bidding could be done as well somehow, but I don't know enough about FD yet to be really sure about this. Who would be interested in such a tool? Is there anybody willing to help? No reverse engineering would be necessary, since Bridge2Symmetric can be decompiled into perfectly readable Java code, so one can simply use the original classes to access the bidding tree. BTW don't start looking for b2s on the Internet, it's not sold anymore. --Sigi

So what? Would this harm the functionality of BBO in any way? No. It would just be that the users of the open source client would miss this feature (for some time). No, I think missing features are not a problem at all -- after all, using the open source client would not be mandatory, it would be something you choose to do, and mostly the users would be competent users of alternative platforms like Linux (as has been pointed out). My assumption is that either the protocol is crap and that Fred doesn't want other people to find out about this he just does not want other people to mess with his "baby" Both reasons would be perfectly legitimate from Fred's perspective. In a private conversation with Uday [...self-censored part deleted...] If the server protocol is sound, and good documentation is provided to the community that will develop a new client, I don't think why this should be a problem to the safety of BBO. Fred could even give the binary for the server to the project so they could savely test anything they have made. Having said that, I do respect Fred's wishes, since he provides a good service for free and is not planning to change that (it being free). However, I think the GUI of BBO leaves much to be desired and that a free project would be easily able to make something a lot better in this regard. After all, there are only two (?) people working on the BBO codebase, one being a professional bridge player with not much time to do programming; they simply don't have the resources to do a rewrite or a new GUI. IMHO having a Java/SWT client would be optimal. I'm also wondering why there's no good open source bridge server/client around. Probably there are simply not enough juniors who can code to have a reasonable probability that a project would emerge (I would be happy to contribute to such a project, but one would have to get organized and get a group together to get it started). --Sigi

Hi, apart from the much-demanded feature of having swiss/ko team matches, I would also like to have an easy way to use pre-dealt boards on all tables. That would add the necessary facilities to organise a team league on BBO (which I'm planning to do). Without an easy way to have all tables play the same boards you can't have a fair league (obviously). --Sigi

Luis, your stories and humour are just great. I would love to sit against ppl like you more often. Unfortunately most people are too preoccupied with pointing out partner's faults instead of developing some humour at the table. --Sigi

Why not ? Who said moscito isnt blue ? I dont see any resson for it. Surely the transfer openings make it red? I dont think so but we dont have any problem with red here in Israel. edited I think its more blue then red, but yes i might be wrong and its red. I've seen the conv card Marston uses and it says RED. So there's no doubt about this (besides the regs being quite clear about it in this case anyway: you alter "basic methods" according to position of opener). --Sigi

Doesn't this make Drury a HUM ? Depends how you define "basic methods". Probably this is supposed to refer to things like changing from a strong club system to a natural system. Probably the problem is that "basic methods" is just inherently too fuzzy to be defined properly. Of course the reasoning behind such a restriction is to avoid having players play different methods accoring to pos/vul (in Poland it's legal and it's being done!). E.g. natural when opps white, precision when opps red or the like. Unfortunately you ban some perfectly legitimate systems by simply stating that "you can't alter your openings according to position". Moscito is one good example. Everybody will agree that it is just another (fairly artificial) Strong Club system, but the relay openers just don't make sense in 3rd/4th, so of course you have to open differently there to make the system effective. This doesn't mean you're playing two different systems (since methods are fairly natural in this case, nobody would have trouble defending against them anyway). --Sigi

Doesn't this make Drury a HUM ? The original post didn't quote the proper section about HUMs in the WBF regulations (which is actually above the part of the text that had been quoted). If you vary things other than Notrump range according to pos/vuln, your system becomes a RED system, but not HUM. This is why Moscito surely is NOT BLUE, but RED, because you open naturally in 3rd/4th while using transfer openings in 1st/2nd. Systematically having lighter major openers in 3rd (which is the only reason to play Drury) strictly speaking turns your system RED, but obviously its not regarded by US bridge dictators because its so common to open light in 3rd. I think the ACBL regulations are ridiculous to say the least. The WBF regs are a lot better. I wish they would use them here in Germany (they use something very similar, but not identical). German regs disallow varying openers in 3rd/4th except in the highest category which isn't offered very often (it allows HUMs, too). Apart from that I agree with the people who promote maximum freedom in bidding. But unfortunately DrTodd is right when he observes that the majority will prevail, and the majority is 70+ yrs old and can't be bothered with playing against "new stuff". Bridge will not flourish unless more freedom is reintroduced. --Sigi

In Germany we have a teaching system that greatly simplifies Bridge in the beginning, by replacing the bidding phase with something much simpler (which basically boils down to counting HCPs, distributional values and comparings lengths, looking for a fit). This has been imported from France where it has been used to great success. It's called "Minibridge". For very young players there are also competitions offered in this kind of game. IMHO this practically solves the problem Justin has mentioned. It doesn't solve the LoL image problem our game has, however... --Sigi