Sigi_BC84

Zar also says to open with 25 proper Zar points if you are holding a real spade suit, so the hand in question would actually be a 1st hand opener according to Zar. One could devalue the Kx slightly, but the great spade suit compensates for that in my opinion. I guess in third hand almost anybody will open this. --Sigi

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Just calculating your Zar points to judge the opening value of your hand is not hard. Zar reckons (correctly in my opinion) that it's not harder than the old-fashioned method of counting HCPs and adding distributional points. Zar Points = HCP + controls + distributional Zar points HCPs and controls are easy, and distributional Zars are not much harder after you've counted them 5-10 times: two longest + ( longest - shortest ). So 5/4 hands always have 9 + something where something only depends on your shortness: if you have a void, it's 5, with a singleton it's 4, without shortness it's 3. So your distributional Zars for that common hand type are always between 12 and 14, depending on your shortness. This is really easy to calculate in a second even without doing the full maths (which wouldn't take more 3-5 seconds longer...). If you know Bergen points: ZP = Bergen + controls + (longest-shortest). The only "effort" required for ZP is calculating (longest-shortest), there's is not much more to it. It gets more complicated when you want to take partners fit into consideration, but here we're only talking about opening value. I always open using Zar points which eases my mind a lot at the table. --Sigi

??? Why should "Westerners" not be able to understand Russian Scoring? Because of the name? It's only called "Russian" because it was invented by some Russians (Ukrainians if I'm not mistaken), apart from that it's not Russian at all :-). The plain explanation most people should be able to understand would be: "you are playing against the average score expected for your combined HCP holding". --Sigi

No fair giving away all the secrets! :D One could turn it into a little game: you are given a double dummy question or a bridge master deal and if you solve it within a time limit you are granted one piece in the feature-puzzle. If you fail you get bad hands for a week or so (trumps won't break, misfit, 35 HCP hands that barely make 4-something, you name it). The puzzles will get increasingly difficult. The best features are saved for the true experts! Naturally, like in all online games, so called "power gamers" who spent 8 hours/day playing Bridge will be at an advantage. We would have to cope with that. --Sigi

Hey! That's another right-click-feature I didn't know yet (I was wondering why you couldn't mark text in the chat area like in "normal" applications, now I've got the answer ;-). I'm hereby petitioning to put up a list with all hidden right-click-features in BBO. --Sigi

It's always worthwhile to make a test printout with all the different fonts in question on one sheet. Many fonts look different on paper than on screen (mostly they look better on paper because the special symbol tend not to be optimized for screen display in most fonts). The Unicode points for suit symbols start with 2600 for ♠. Open Character Map, enable "Advanded View" and enter that value into the appropriate field. The view then jumps to the symbol and you don't have to browse the map. I was there but couldn't find the item I'm looking for in their shop. All I found were the usual playing cards. But I've found out by now that they are called "No Revoke" Spectrum cards and are indeed manufactured by Carta Mundi, so they should be available in Germany somehow. I'm gonna keep looking. --Sigi

And it's free (the light weight server variant is, but you can run a Win XP in there, too, of course)! --Sigi

To the dange of sounding terribly presumptous I'm stating an observation which might be related to BBO: It is very, very important towards the usability of a software product that the developers actually use the product intensely themselves. If you are never playing pickup-games, it's of course hard to spot problems in that area. If you are not chatting a lot on your own server, of course you won't be aware that many users are actually doing that, making the chat system woefully inadequate. In fact, it's more or less impossible to see certain classes of serious issues with your software if you don't use it a lot yourself. I've bought several mobile phones already, discovering serious usability issues several weeks into using them which were clearly caused by the fact that the designers themselves probably are using a phone by another manufacturer... (Please don't take offense Fred, but deducing from several remarks you made about lack of time I get the feeling that you might be underusing your own product...). --Sigi

Having access to a command line does not preclude providing a graphic interface for the unassuming user -- the GUI functionality does not even have to be a subset of the CLI functionality. One approach, for example chosen by FIBS (First Internet Backgammon Server) is to give the server a text-only interface with a special mode for graphical clients to use. In other words, the graphical client is merely a front-end for the "actual" service, which would be purely text based. This would add some transparency to the communication with the server however, and apparently this is not wanted at the moment by BBO. Anyways I don't see the balancing act to be performed here, as you would always have the choice to hide certain "power" features from the masses by simply not offering a GUI option for them. Take FPS games: all of them are featuring a "console" which you don't need to play the game, but if you want to access advanced functionality you have that option. Centering the entire application around a chat system like Internet Relay Chat (or multi user games which merely mimic it in that regard) would be a wise decision in any case. The paradigm used in these systems is highly useful for a game server where people meet in groups to communicate. If you look closely at it, most of BBO is related to communication between groups of people: users chatting with users (not at a table) players talking to players (while at a table) kibs talking to players and vice versa players talking with TDs users listening to commentators while talking to eachother The only time users are not chatting is while they are playing the cards (mostly). So clearly, the system would be reasonably design around chat not around card tables or any other concept. How could such a system look in practice? The basic entity would be a "room", with a freely chosen name and a set of members. Members could be "invisible" and "away". Rooms could be "invite only", "invisible", "read only" etc. Every room has a set of "operators" who have extended rights in that room (e.g. changing room parameters or kicking and banning users from the room). NB this is all nothing new but stolen from IRC. Now we're still missing the Bridge: One way to add it would be to have special types of rooms, which could contain a bidding table, a playing table, a kibbing table (for training and vugraph) and possibly more. Another way could be to give the possibility for room operators to add tables to a chat room. So the new way of opening a table would be to create an empty room (simply by entering it) and then create a table in the room. Users in the room would then have the ability to sit down at that table. When the playing is over you simply delete the table -- the room remains, giving the remaining players the option to chat around for a bit longer, or consider going to another room with a table, or maybe open a bidding table and practice a bit. It is very flexible. Of course there are special situations to be considered, for example money bridge and other tournaments. Also, some constraints would need to be checked, for example a user already playing at a table will be in a special mode, imposing certain restrictions (eg. "cannot receive/send personal messages", "cannot read/write in certain classes of rooms" etc.). What fun could it be to log onto BBO and have > /join +i #funtable * Joining channel #funtable * set to "invite only" > /topic no fake experts please * Topic is now "no fake experts please" > /create table imp * Playing table created * Scoring set to IMPs * Room is now a play room > /invite myon * Sent invite to "myon" * myon is joining the room * myon is sitting down North > /sit south * Sitting down South (just a very raw sketch here, and not very original even). Part or all of it would be accessible through simple GUI functions as well, at no additional cost. From a software engineering perspective this will not be more complicated than todays BBO (especially considering that todays BBO already offers much of the described functionality, only not in the systematic way outlined above). In fact I'm sure it would even be easier, for several reasons: you have a clearly defined, easy to grasp concept around which to design the system you can draw from an extensible base of code implementing these kinds of systems the paradigm is tried-and-true, tested and in use for decades, so you certainly won't make a lot of mistakes and design errors because others have avoided them for you already Simply install an IRC client and a MMORPG and have a look how it's done there. I'll stop here now, rambled on for much too long already. --Sigi

I like that one! Thanks for the link. I was actually looking around for while but couldn't find anything. --Sigi

Forget about the Symbol font. You don't need it. Arial and many other popular fonts have the four suit symbols included. Proper Unicode fonts have the "white" variants included as well. Use the white variants for black&white documents, and use the stock variants in four colors for colored documents. That's all. Do you know any Internet retailers? I'd be interested in having a look at prices and such. --Sigi

Uh oh. I've been thinking about it, too. Of course the points you are making are perfectly valid, but I don't think they will be appreciated. Rationale: 1. The WBF (and many national Bridge organizations) are quite keen to get Bridge accepted as a "sport". Replacing the cards with computers will most decidedly not contribute towards that goal (there are computer games which could be considered as sports as much as Bridge, but that is not the opinion of the general public, except maybe in South Korea). It will also make it look very sterile and "dishumanize" it further (screens are weird enough to the layperson already). Take poker on TV: they are playing with real cards there, and the other day I've seen an event sponsored by PartyPoker where they used real Pound Sterling bills instead of chips to make it look cooler. Well, they could use computers and make it more secure (and easier for the broadcaster), but they don't, and this is for publicity reasons. But since Bridge has a large bonus, publicity-wise... 2. Quite a few players don't like to play computer Bridge. You would be coercing them into using a medium they don't like, whereas using normal playing cards can be expected from everyone. So I'd expect substantial player opposition as well. 3. Computer games are raising mixed feelings among the general population (and possibly many bridge players as well). Many (esp. older) people are still feeling reservations concerning modern technology. This will change over the next few decades, but before that I don't think Bridge is ready for going electronic. Tradition also goes a long way. Have you seen how high class Japanese Go tournaments are held? --Sigi

I was not saying that having any symbols in the page is bad or will lead to trouble when emailing. What I'm saying is that using images (GIF, PNG or JPG) as suit symbols is a bad idea. By all means use ♠ or the actual character (with proper encoding, as explained above) instead of writing "S", "H", "D", "C" (I find that highly annoying, and probably I'm not alone), just don't use pixel images. --Sigi

If all you want is a really simple webpage, and all this advanced stuff is too much for the moment, just do the following: In the HTML header of your page, make sure you have <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> (preferably as the first element after the <head> tag). Now you can use any character that actually exists in the font you are using -- right in the HTML code. So you can actually cut'n'paste a "real" ♠ symbol from somewhere (or enter it via a keyboard macro) into the HTML file you are creating. This is easier to read for you while you are writing the page, but you lose the colorization possibility that way (that calls for a <span> element in any case). Make sure that your editor or HTML editor saves the page in "UTF-8" encoding, or else it won't work. --Sigi

You can take a look at the HTML code that is generated for forum posts to get an idea. Let's take the spade symbol as an example, this is generated as: <span class="spades">♠</span> and CSS class "spades" is defined as follows: <style type="text/css"> .spades { color: blue; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 120% } </style> (If you don't know yet what "CSS" means, I strongly suggest learning about that because it makes web site composition a lot more convenient.) If you don't want to type that long <span> thing all the time, you could invent a short sequence (eg. "!s" like in BBO) and search/replace this with the above later (after you're finished writing the actual page). Or you could make an editor macro to insert the appropriate string. Maybe your HTML editor has a special way to do this sort of stuff. It all depends... Having said that, I strongly discourage the use of small graphics (images) as card symbols. This gets highly inconvenient if you want to cut/paste out of the page, or send the content via email or print as text etc. --Sigi

My pain spots: 1. Chat system (as discussed before and mentioned by others). 2. Too much functionality hidden in context (right-click) menus; for example I only recently learned that you can short-cut browsing the lobby through a context menu. I don't think a user interface should be like a dungeon in an RPG where you discover hidden secrets one by one. (@Fred: you have mentioned before that you don't like menu bars because users tend not to find functionality there, but the current approach is certainly worse...) Edit: I'm not against context menus per se but I think they should only apply to actual entities. For example, a name in the lobby or a player at the table should have a context menu, but not just any button on the user interface. Also I found it highly against intuition right from the beginning of using BBO that certain settings relating to your own account can only be accessed by going through a context menu attached to your own name (which doesn't happen to be visible at all times). So it happens that I can't change my profile (or edit my friend list etc.) when I'm browsing the tournament list (because my name is nowhere visible in this case) -- meanwhile, there is the cog wheel button suggesting a central access point for all kinds of settings, but it doesn't include your profile and the other stuff you have to go to via the context menu. 3. Too coarse granularity of friend levels (friend/neutral/enemy is not enough, I need at least one level more). 4. Too many pop-ups. Pop-ups suck. One advertisement per login is OK (BBO makes their money that way), but I don't want to acknowledge ten messages from various clubs one after the other. Create an inbox of some sort. Edit: A few more example: popups when somebody invites you to a tourney, when the invitation is accepted, when somebody knocks at your table, when you knock at a table and are declined, when you successfully register at a tourney, when you try to register but are declined and probably more cases I have missed. This is nuts. The main problem with popups is that they steal focus and cover parts of the screen you might happen to be looking at this moment... This is especially problematic if it's not you who is causing the pop-ups (but events happening on the internet, as in this case). The tourney invitations should go via a simple chat message (you can query the additional information then) for example. In most other cases the information could simply be displayed at an appropriate spot of the main window. 5. Non-standard user interface (custom-made buttons, no menu bar, window doesn't maximise properly), dodgy in some places; I strongly hope this will be different with the (yet to be developed) "new" BBO. --Sigi

Assuming your question is not directed specifically towards the usage within BBO (can you actually change the font for the BBO client?): I'm particularly partial to fonts which contain "white" suit symbols for hearts and diamonds, which are a lot more readable on black and white printouts than the standard symbols. These are unicode points 2661 and 2662 respectively (this is how they look: ♡ ♢). The Windows Character Map utility allows you to check your fonts for the presence of these symbols (Arial Unicode certainly contains them). Most fonts contain the standard card symbols, but as I said they are not as easy to read if you can't colorize them appropriately (I'm convinced by now that the best colorization scheme in the one most people use on these forums, ie. ♠♥♦♣; I think they should use it on playing cards as well, would make sorting the hand way easier and you would have less accidents regarding diamonds and hearts...). --Sigi

I mostly play with my regular partner or other players from my real life bridge club. Often my opponents are also people I know from real life bridge (ie. we are a small group of people meeting up on BBO to complement our RL bridge). We like to play tournaments as well (only free tournaments as of yet, although some pay clubs, eg. Homebase, look promising). Also we have a group of around 15 players who used to meet up regularly for team matches. These are actual real life teams which are playing in several German regional leagues. Lately we didn't have any matches but actually these sessions were fun and a good example of how BBO can help with making bonds across regional boundaries. In the meantime, an informal German team league has been organized and is about to be played during the course of the year. This will be fairly serious bridge and I expect a fairly high quality field (esp. compared to club events). Most of this could be counted as practice towards improving our "serious" play. I play the occasional pickup game/tourney and individual tournament, and I've also made a few online aquaintances that way with whom I play from time to time. All in all, I consider BBO to be a substantial part of my bridge playing life and it would be a lot less interesting for us if it didn't exist (and there was no comparable replacement). --Sigi

I consider all of what you listed equally important. Probably having quality competition (strength of the field/club) is underrated in general. Many people think they are good players because they don't have many "real" opponents. --Sigi

As others have pointed out, in real life SAYC does not equal SAYC. Without discussion on several details you will have misunderstandings if you only agree on "SAYC". If you don't have a regular partner/mentor, I recommend that you use the new convention card feature of BBO called "Full Disclosure" when playing online with pickup partners. Using Full Disclosure, both you and partner (and your opponents) see the meaning of your bids. Additionally you see what the possible bids in the running auction would mean when it's your turn to make a call. This applies to most uncontested auctions and some competitive sequences. I always have a simple system loaded in Full Disclosure when I'm playing with pickup partners. If you want to get serious I'd say you need a regular partner. Agree on a solid, not too complicated system and play that. Actually I think that the OKBridge SAYC Notes are really good (better than the mentioned ACBL booklet). When playing with pickup partners, don't worry about misunderstandings, weird auctions and silliness. It can't be avoided unless your partner is really good and you are on the same wavelength by chance. --Sigi

Maybe I may add that Caren is talking about Tango Argentino specifically, which is very different from classic ballroom Tango. The music is different as well, although you can dance both dances to certain songs. The music is great (Gotan Project from Paris have become popular outside of Tango circles, very recommended). --Sigi

Not surprised about that... (SCNR :-) --Sigi

Taking that kind of position you never exceed a certain (average) level of quality with a software product (or any product). Having said that, I have heard your point being made before. Maybe it depends mainly on how much one expects from a piece of software and maybe too how much experience one has with computer games and social software (I don't have much experience developing either, but I have used quite a few so certain ideas about how it should look come to mind naturally when I'm using BBO). What makes BBO great in the first place is the community, and the company's dedication to the community and Fred's idealism. It is time for the software to meet this high standard. Anyways if the client was total crap nobody would be using it, so that certainly has not been suggested by anyone. Fred has said already that a redesign/rewrite of the client is overdue, I'm not going to turn this into the second horse waiting to be beaten to death now :-). --Sigi

As mentioned in another thread: the entire chat system should be based on channels which players can join and leave freely at all times. So if you don't care about the Lobby, you simply don't join #lobby... One discussion less about the necessity of lobby chat with such a system. FWIW I've turned off lobby chat because it's pretty useless :-). --Sigi