zenko

Still cant find challenge hand records. Is that available?

Well the answer is way more complex than that. Your chance of having long clubs when opening 1 club (standard, or standardish) decreases dramatically with each seat. Or in another words if you open 1 club in 1st seat there is a fair chance you actually have real club suit. On 4th seat if you open 1 club you will rarely have 5+ clubs. I actually kept stats on that for a while, in a sample of 3000+ hands 4th seat "real" 1 club opening had less than 1 in 10 occurrence, rest being some kind of balanced hands with 4 or 3 clubs. The cause for that is pretty logical, if you have long clubs most of the time somebody else has long suit too and will usually find a reason to open it in front of you.

Well it's not that simple, if you open with 5 card very rarely and/or in special conditions (for example, "occasionally 3rd seat favorable, almost never otherwise"), explaining it as 5+ (unless precisely in that position) would be more misleading than not. Bear in mind this is very diffeent issue than say, do you have 6 or 7, when saying 6+, becuase 6 card suits are way more common that 7 carders, and 5 card suits are way more common than 6 card suits, so when you tell me you can have more than 6 cards suit I can almost ignore it, but if you say 5+ I have to adjust my bidding/play to cater for 5 card suit possibity.

Can I put +slow+ in my personal profile? would that help in case I am not the host?

Hi, Notice how team game hosts often announce that they will accept only paired players into team match? I would LOVE to have that as one of table settings options as a single table host, especially ina a web app. Playing vs regular or at least semi-regular partnerships is way better than vs random pairings. So for start that setting can be easily connected with "I have a partner, take me to the table" option in "find me a game" menu. Also that would surely incerase the number of people using "I have a pard" tool, when they know that using that tool will not take them to some random table where players come and go every 2 seconds.

All I can say is that only a non-bridge player person can come up with this kind of "brilliant" feature.

I downloaded 3.41 version last night on my Samsung Android tablet with Ice Cream Sandwich, but for some reason sound is still off (yes I turned it on in options), sound works fine for other web sites so I am pretty sure its a bug of some kind. If it is not a bug but just me being dumb (wich is very unlikely, I tried every possible option) please add some kind of help menu. Lack of sound efects and no wide screen option were the reasons I stayed away from it so far so hopefully it will work. Also I am thinking about upgrading to Jelly Bean, will the app work with it? All best, Daniel

There is nothing sarcastic about it, "slow pokes" dislike playing with "speed freaks" as much if not even more as the other way around. To me playing fast is just mindless waste of time, about as attractive as watching paint dry. Furthermore, I have no intention whatsoever to speed up my play, if anything I am trying to slow down even more. Obviously that kind of attitude is unacceptable for many, so please let us go our separate ways. The only really issue to ponder is it better to carve part of the main playing room into a separate "Speedball" room or to do the other way around, make the whole main room a Speedball room and have a separate "Slow cooking" room.

Any self-reporting tool does not work because of The Dunning–Kruger effect,a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes. BBO probably can devolop some automated, result-based tool, but it has to be discrete and in the beackground, and used only to properly match up players who randomly look for a game, but its all much more trouble than its worth.

Fantastic idea! Instead of suggesting Ritalin therapy, then I can just send them into that room.

E-W cards should be turned 90 degrees to make them much easier to read SA SK SQ etc. I understand that creates screen real estate issue but there is no real reason why the W's bottom card and E's top card should have "full" display (at least while all 13 cards are in play), if you give them as much space as to the rest of the hand I think it is doable.

Exactly, If I play with my friends thats precisely why I play with them, I can not care less whats their rating. The rating comes in play only with random partners, I would of course love to play only with better players than me, but I will take anybody who is worse than me but not too much, I am never in a mood for teaching strangers how to play, especially for free. I truly believe that people rarely overstate their skill level on purpose. Bridge is one of those games where is hard to grasp how much you do NOT know untill you become quite good. I can not really blame somebody who managed to execute their first intentional squeeze to feel like expert after that (its been long ago, so I cant quite remember it, but I surely felt like I am up there, one step below Bermuda Bowl champs). This is how it should work: when I click on "take me to the next available seat" the program should pair me up with open seat across the player with "rating" (or however you want to call it) closest to mine. If a new table forming all 4 players should be selected the same way, closest possible to each other. Also you can have a tool to set a range of pards I am intereset playing with, that I can limit from both (or just one) sides, say in 20 percentile range around mine. Also tagging somebody as a friend overides the feature, so it can be used by table host to stear away inadequate opponents. Ratings should not be visible to anybody and should completely reset fairly often, say every 50-100 boards, that would make them bit less reliable, but thats small price to pay to keep everything friendly.

Rating players can help make BBO experience much better when it comes to random partnerships, which most of us avoid because we do not get matched up to players with adequate skill level. For that purpose we would like to focus on their playing technique and knowledge of commonly used system(s). The rating system can be completely discrete, so no hurt feelings. To put it simply, if there is a way to be paired up with a player of my ability (or close) I would play much significantly more often than I do now, and I am sure many share this sentiment. It is clearly in BBO's best interest to do something about it.

But why would do you want to cheat on the test, to not disturb your own dilusion? The point of the whole exercise is to give you fair and objective feedback where do you stand in comparison with other players, not to make you look cool, after all like Hamman correctly noted: "we all play bad, some of us just bit less lousy than the rest", or something like that. If cheating is on your mind you will always find a way to game any system.

I think Mycroft is spot on. The only way to do it is to go Wonderlic route, a 10-20 questions test that will, properly devised, give acurate enough picture of your skill. Nobody really need to know is he precisely in 90th or 92nd percentile. Its quite easy to create that kind of test(s), in tennis you can often tell how good somebody is just by the way he bounces the ball, same goes for bridge.

Not bad. How about everytime somebody at my table says "faster" he gets automatic warning "say it once more and you will get booted and banned from my table forever" + a web link where he can get cheap Canadian ritalin? Or at least lets have "slow play encouraged" tables, same way we have relaxed or rubber bridge tables.

When I play a tourney with my regular pards (and thats the only way I play them) if they lose connection I am 100% sure they are coming back (barring an earthquake or computer catching fire), so the last thing I need is some random sub jumping in, usually just seconds before my pard is back online. It would be nice to have a tag that would notify directors to stay away. To avoid delays that tag should be set to automatically expire after a few minutes or close to the end of the round.

Whats excatly wrong/strange with that system? It is bare bones but any player familiar with Weak NT should be able to handle it. And for those who are not, playing with Bradley can be great chance to learn a bit about it, which is certanly useful since sooner or later they will have to play vs somebody who plays it (like me for example), instead of patronising him.

1444 - 2S 1435 - 2S/2N depending of the texture, most of the time 2S better 1453 - 2S 1345 - 2N 1354 - 2S 1255 - 2N Key thing to consider is that the issue of missing club fit in real life rarely occurs, with a half a deck of points and likley 8 card fits in a red suit(s) they will almost never let you bid alone, which is actually a good thing in these cases, i.e. if they do not interefere assume pard has a strong option, and will knowe to bid again if needed after you "support" him with singleton, he is very much aware that you have exactly 1 or 2 spades and very crappy hand

No it was not done to reduce number of calculations, it is done to reduce disparity of median and mean results, actually it is even more important to do it with less than statistcally significant number of results to compare, becuse a few freak results will throw the mean completely out of whack.

All I am askng for is scoring method that will corelate with quality of my effort, is that really too much to ask? For those who do not like Butler socring here are few clarifications: 1) Nothing gets "thrown out", extremes are just not counted when calculating the average, ALL results are then compared to that "normalized" average. 2) Disregarding 3 results from each side would help a lot to reduce that 3 IMPs per board "declarer advantage". If you examine typical cold game score sheet "funny" results are almost never equally distributed at the both ends, usually you have about 3-5 on one side (missed/failed game, tried slam) and 1-3 in the other (contract doubled and made), using middle 10 results would help a lot. 3) Team matches are even more volatile, even if all 8 players are competent, becuase there is only one comparising, playng against "the field" is much better to figure out where is your game 4)"it all evens out anyway" just makes no sense. For start it is quite common that you play set of 20-30 boards that is very onesided result-wise, so yes it all evens out in very long run, but who cares? In the long run we are all dead too. And one more thing: being involved in lot of software development (yes in Flex/Flash environment too!) I can not shake off the feeling that there is simply not much going on lately at BBO Inc. on that front. If the money is the issue I suggest doing some kind of drive like Wikipedia does, I am the first one who will donate some money if it means hiring an additional programer to help Uday, if it would lead to better user experience.

I am bit tired of getting -3 IMPs for every cold game my opponents bid and make (and no, getting +3 IMPs for every cold game we bid and make does not make up for that, the whole point is minimizing the effect of who holds better cards). I understand that 16 scores as max for comparing is hardcoded, but why dont you do what every Butler IMPs pairs game does and simply disregard extreme scores when calculating averages (say 3 extremes from each side). Thats surely not hardcoded.

I much prefer playing against set pairs for many reasons, and I am sure most players share my sentiment. As a table host currently there is no way to filter incoming players based on that. For start you can create easy sofware development solution - add a "Allow only pairs" filter to "Table options" menu. To locate pairs loking for a game just link that filter to users of "I have a partner. Take us to the table" option (under "Help me find a game" menu), and everybody is happy.

I have been trying out that method too, and seems very promising, one thing to mention that it really works better in strong club / 14-16 NT system. You can play 14-16 nt and "natural" club, but than you haved to jump around with 17 or play transfers over 1 club which may be a deal breaker.

I disagree big time with this, I play weak NT in all seats, with no runouts, and over the last 3000 hands or so we never went for a number, in fact we played doubled only once for -1 (-100), the other table made vul 3nt other way for +12 IMPS. What you really need the most is the structure how to deal with opponents bidding after you open 1 in a suit with 15-17 balanced, you are against the field and your judgement/agrements will very often lose/bring a lot of matchpoints, or create medium size swing in IMPs.