Sigi_BC84

For what it's worth, if I played a method like Moscito or Dejeuner, where a point count different from Milton-Work is systemically applied, I would translate the ranges into M-W and use those in my announcements. This certainly is not as accurate a description as when using your "native" point count, but you do players a better service because they can apply their own "point count feel" to your bids. In my eyes this outweighs the lack of accuracy. When facing expert oppos or when playing in a longer event you could still offer to explain accurately if your opponents prefer that. --Sigi

International law prohibits assaulting foreign countries if not for self defense, if I understand it correctly. So, yes, the US should respect the will of the United Nations in this regard and not simply attack sovereign states (no matter how evil) if it sees fit. This does not apply when there is a real threat (from nuclear weapons for example). There was no such threat coming from Iraq. --Sigi

The reason for people putting this into their profiles is probably that firstly, a trump lead is more often bad than beneficial and secondly that people tend to lead a trump because they have no other attractive lead. But basically, such a statement in your profile assumes that your pickup partner will be a bonehead. I'm far from being an expert, but usually I lead a trump when the opponents have clearly bid on distribution (leading a trump will cut down their ruffing power and hence reduce the total value of their hand) the bidding suggests distributional values in dummy or in both hands (often the case when it took them a few bids to agree on a trump suit) we have more trumps than declarer (eg. after a penalty pass) Eddie Kantar's Modern Bridge Defense has a very nice chapter on trump leads. I recommend you get that book. --Sigi

As far as i know, BBO has no book of laws of their own. So the only set of bridge laws arround are those of the WBL. Any other organisazion adapts them for their use. The only organisations that certifies TD's, are doing this using the laws of the WBL. So this is the set of laws they are certified to enforce. So if you decide only to use a subset of those laws, you should state that in your condition of contest. The right to host tourneys on BBO, has nothing to do with beeing a certified TD. 1. There is no "certified BBO TD". You are a TD if uday makes you one. From what I've heard, in certain countries the situation is quite the same in f2f bridge even. 2. National bridge organizations are encouraged (but not enforced!) to follow the WBF guidelines, but many fail to do so (including Germany's organization and, most notably, the ACBL). 3. The fact that BBO has no governing body (and, hence, no formal regulations) does not mean that automatically the WBF regulations are adapted. Basically, BBO is a Bridge anarchy and table/tourney hosts decide if they want to play pure Bridge (which means, full disclosure but no restrictions) or want to somehow cripple the game by introducing system regulations. In the latter case, I still see no reason why the WBF regulations should be the model. A purely Polish tournament for sure will accept Wilkosz, which would be clearly against WBF guidelines for low-level tournaments. BTW Todd has already mentioned in his original post that no restrictions had been advertised for the tournament he was playing in. Therefore, anything goes (I don't see a reason to assume any WBF category). --Sigi

If you're not ready to do scripting, you have to do copy-and-paste or simple find-and-replace. Maybe you have an editor which can handle regular expressions during find-and-replace (Word and Notepad can't), which will make it slightly easier. Long-term solutions to this and similar problems include a scripting language for bidding systems or a really fancy editor for the FD files. --Sigi

One of the key points you failed to mention is leverage. The manager of a restaurant, heck, even the chef, do have a lot more leverage regarding the success of the business than the waiter. In turn, they should also be responsible (financially) for their decisions and not be able to pass on the risk in a cheap way to their employees. If the chef messes up, the customer will certainly be less inclined to tip generously even if the waiter provided a flawless service. If the manager messes up (for example by not advertising enough) and the restaurant does not get enough customers, again the waiter is screwed without being able to do anything about it. --Sigi

Claus, in my eyes you talk quite a lot of rubbish when it's about disclosure at the table and other issues concerning enforcement of rules on BBO. However, when reading your contributions to these political discussions I get the impression that you are an educated individual and you are not afraid to voice your opinion and defend it. This goes a long way. I'm sure many others here will agree. So rest assured that certainly not all of BBF disagrees just because it's csdenmark speaking. --Sigi

What the WBF regulations say does not matter on BBO, because most BBO tournaments are not WBF endorsed events. When I'm a BBO TD and chose to open a tourney where "anything goes", I'd certainly not accept if anybody pointed to any WBF regulation and told me I couldn't hold the event as I liked. All the system regulations around, be it WBF, ACBL or national specialties only matter if the event is hosted under the auspices of the respective body. This is not the case for a typical BBO tournament. --Sigi

Yeah, let's ignore scientific facts. In this case a good way to continue squandering without feeling bad about it. Not in the Netherlands. Oops, I do speak German, what went wrong? Talking about freedom: the US are in the process of dispensing with that concept in the name of homeland security (so are the Europeans, sadly enough). --Sigi

What does a 3♦ opener mean in your system??? --Sigi

Now that Claus finally manages to display an opinion of his with which one I'm actually ready to agree you accuse him of trolling. Sigh. I'm sorry Nick, but this is completely misguided. The point is that in the US people who are waiting tables are forced into a position where they are at the mercy of the customer to pay them properly (because their employer fails to do so). This can be seen as quite a humiliating situation for the employee, and the only thing that Claus can be accused of here is choosing somewhat harsh terms to express his opinion. Furthermore he went to great lengths to explain the situation in his home country and why he thinks that their approach is superior. To me these were legitimate attempts at pursuing an educated debate and certainly not trolling. BTW the DONT convention really sucks... --Sigi

We should blame ourselves for brown-nosing with the US administration (and China)... --Sigi

Add me to list. --Sigi

That's not so important, since the countries bordering Germany are all mere icing on the cake anyway :-). (Do any of the British here disagree?) --Sigi

Well, this is a rough figure that I've heard before and I cannot cite an official source at this moment, but lets look at this list: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil-consuming_states) ------->8 Countries in decreasing order of oil consumption. (Barrels per day, as of 2003.) United States 20,033,504 Japan 5,578,386 China 5,550,000 Germany 2,677,443 ------->8 So compared to Germany, consumption is about 2,2 times higher (measured in barrels of oil per head per year). NB I've used the population figures for 2006, but the numbers above are for 2003, so the actual ratio is a bit worse (since the US population has increased by about 5% since 2003). Apparently it's closer to 2 than to 3 when comparing with major industrial nations like Japan or Germany. --Sigi

When I'm looking at Marston's latest variant (let's call it the "official" Moscito), I'm getting the impression that apart from the limited transfer opening he has largely ignored this problem. Many of relay responder's bids are natural. I am somewhat confused by PM's decision to go down this road (obviously he did it for memory reasons). Some day I will run a few simulations to see how many uncontested contracts in average end up "wrong" sided. --Sigi

This is not a matter of believe, because just by looking at the energy consumption per capita (which is about three times higher in the US compared to Europe) it becomes very clear that the US should be able to reduce their energy throughput by a huge margin before it becomes a problem for the economy. The truth is that they simply don't want to care, because it's so much easier to squander resources heads on and only look at growth, growth, growth. What I think is really sad is that obviously the US public has successfully been talked into believing statements like those made by Todd (I draw this conclusion from the fact that even educated and critical people like Todd are prone to believe these lies). --Sigi

Naturally if you can't schedule the league in a way so that all matches in a round happen at the same time, the predup idea is worthless. Maybe I should not have brought it up in the first place, but I'm surprised that it draws so much attention. I'd certainly prefer a more accurate measurement, but I think we should just see which variant works out best and pleases the highest number of people. To me a substantial part of team matches is that you can get everything ranging from a close win to crushing the opponents. If you take that away you're eliminating a part of the fun in my eyes. --Sigi

I certainly know how to computer generate hands and I'd probably even manage to convert them on my own into a format that BBO accepts for predealt hands. It is, however, with the current version of the software, not exactly an easy task to properly upload the hands into a team event. You have do to that within a certain time frame after starting the event, and it's not obvious at all that it is even possible (because you don't get the option of doing it until after starting the event, if I'm not mistaken). That certainly matches my idea of "pain in the butt". --Sigi

I'm not sure why you'd want to block customers based on IP address anyway. Sure, you're displaying best effort in not offering your service in certain states, but is it really helpful from a legal point of view? If somebody from say, Maryland, wanted to play Money Bridge he or she could just setup a proxy on a machine in a different state and be done with it. Now if that came to light and BBO got sued, would it help them that they tried to block ISPs in that state from using the service? Did your lawyers actually advise you to take this technical measure? To me it looks rather pointless. Doesn't a simple disclaimer suffice? Adult entertainment sites use only a disclaimer, and I haven't heard that any one of them got sued for offering content to underaged individuals. Relating this to Ben's story: if a customer in Maryland finds out that half of the time he's actually dialing in via Virginia and in that case is able to play Real Money Bridge, what is the legal situation here? --Sigi

Please don't dramatize this. I'm not talking about splitting up anything. I'm just proposing that for a start, the leagues should be organized according to time zones -- you are free to compete with your team in every league you want to. Think about it: in a league you don't just challenge a team, and if it doesn't work out you're done with it. A league requires that each team has played all other teams at some point. If certain matches are very hard (or impossible) to schedule, the league will come tumbling down on you really quickly... You don't sound offensive; you rather sound like you're not willing to think this through to the very end (sorry if it's me sounding offensive now). Don't compare the current ladder system to a potential league. These are two different things. --Sigi

I'm just saying that it should be possible to have all tables in a team event play the same boards. In a league you want to pair the teams in a certain way and have them play a certain number of boards. Maybe you want to swap the pairs after the middle of the round. What I want is that all tables in such a setup play the same boards, without having to manually inject boards into each of the tables. --Sigi

Having to explain the creator makes it more complicated. If you don't suppose the existence of a creator (while choosing a model for the universe that doesn't need one) you don't have to struggle with proofs for the existence of the creator as well. Also, if you assume that a creator exists, you expose yourself to questions like "where is this entity now?" which lead to very unsatisfactory answers at most. --Sigi

I think that Todd's suggestion makes sense, but it would be better to remove the root of the problem instead of trying to cure the symptoms. A straightforward way to avoid most misclicks is to require an additional confirmation of actions. The card played, or bid made, would be presented to the user and only after an additional mouse click onto the card/bid, the action would actually be performed. This could be made optional, and then Undos would not (have to) be allowed. Another possibility is drag-and-drop for playing the cards. You have to actually drag out the card and drop it in the middle of the table in order to play it. --Sigi

OK, I cancel my previous claim that time is infinite (ie. that there is no beginning of time) and that this is logical. I replace it by "I assume that time is infinite and that there is no beginning of time" without claiming that this follows from logic. However, I also do not accept any claims of the opposite (ie. that time cannot be infinite). Now, if you still want to uphold your claim that time cannot be infinite, then please give accurate reasoning (or provide some links to sources that do so). Helene has mentioned Occam's Razor already (which in a nutshell says that of two otherwise equally satisfying theories the simpler one is to be preferred). I'm applying this here. If the Big Bang did actually happen, it was replacing something before the singularity, which is beyond our possibilities for observation. Maybe an earlier universe had collapsed into the singularity just to be reborn into the present one, so time never actually ceased to exist -- I do not know. After all, assuming a creator of the world and a beginning of time is not necessary in my eyes and only makes the theory more complicated without explaining more. --Sigi