Mike_P

Apologize in advance for beating this dead horse -- couldn't help myself -- had to resurrect this dead thread....... Like almost everything else, I am struck with how far the internet extends my reach in terms of ways to learn the game, either interactively via on-line play, or via access to a zillion bridge columns on newspaper sites or dedicated online bridge columns, etc., etc. But it still seems so unnecessarily primitive and hard-copy-centric. In an instant I can download any of a thousand bridge columns from a thousand newspaper sites, and then I can try to follow often complex play by reading the commentary and staring at the page and trying to follow what's been played and what's not, etc., etc. What I really want to do is use the column interactively. As it is, I manually enter it into my computer bridge program and then REALLY explore the point the column is trying to make. This manual entry doesn't take long with today's software, but it seems so unnecessary. If I can download the printed form in a heartbeat, for the expenditure of a few extra electrons I should be able to download something like a .pbn file so it's available to me for interactive play and visualization instantly. This is not brain surgery -- why is this never available? Yes, perhaps it's because the bridge public is older and not computer literate, and 90% of the existing base doesn't care and wouldn't use it. And yet, I'm thinking if we don't progress, we don't survive -- right? -- Mike

Wow. I would have guessed just the opposite, but I'm much too new to have a useful opinion. I'll still bet there are a number of folks manually entering hands from hand records from their last FTF event to see how they could have played the hands better. Even if they're not generated at the source, I would have thought that someone on the planet would have cobbled together a utility, even if it were as barbaric as extracting the hand information from the raw .pdf file offline and converting it to .pbn. Anybody know of such a thing? -- Mike

By way of introduction, I'm relatively new to duplicate and the ACBL so am still a stranger in a strange land. So be gentle. :lol: I've begun to attend newcomer duplicate events at local clubs and am having a great time. But so much of it seems so 20th Century. :lol: Usually there are match results on the walls reaching the floor (produced by dot-matrix printers on fan-fold paper) -- reminds me of the output of my Altair years ago. :P At the end of the evening's play, in addition to giving me my own copy of the dot-matrix printout, I'm also given a sheet of paper with the "hand records" of the evening. In some cases, the hand records are also available online at the club site, usually in .pdf format. Why in the world is the latter not routinely available electronically (either by download or email) in a popular computer-readable format (.pbn for example?) so I can immediately replay the hands on GIB, Bridge Baron, Jack, etc.? I must be missing an important issue -- this seems to me to be a no-brainer and drop dead easy, espcially given how many smart folks play the game and given how much automation there is already online. As far as that goes, with today's technology I don't quite understand why we're frantically trying to maintain board by board personal scoring with a lead pencil. Isn't that information on the scorecard and (with admittedly more data entry needed by the club manager of course) this too could be attached electronically and automatically? Any insight welcome. Thanks. -- Mike

Terrific! Thanks. -- Mike

Wow! I'm still pretty new to this but this seems new and exciting. This business of converting .lin to .pbn files is something I've been looking for for some time. Now, using Jack for example, I can load these hands and play them myself. Has there always been such a capability before (.lin to .pbn) and I just missed it? If not, will there eventually be a stand-alone utility I can run locally to convert any .lin to .pbn? -- Mike

We gotta sort our hands after every deal, and this is an exercise that happens a gazillion times a year across the planet. I'm a little surprised I have seen no discussion and have not been able to Google a suggested efficient (and reasonably mindless) way to do it, perhaps arranging over and under as we riffle from one hand to another. I have seen folks (myself included sometimes) who fumble forever with this chore -- I wonder if there is a technique to do this quickly and with a certain amount of elan?...... -- Mike

Thank you! I've just had a chance to glance at it but it appears to be the result of a lot of work. I'm very optimistic. I have the feeling that I represent a large class of user that is trying to slowly accumulate mastery of all of a common card, such as SAYC, and just want to strike out those elements that I haven't learned yet. Perhaps that's already fairly easy to do and the real complexity/hassle happens only if you have a unique convention/personal convention (or, say, a non-SAYC convention) that you have to try to define. If THAT'S the sticky problem we've been talking about, then the problem is not relevant to me. Perhaps this distinction will come out in the tutorial (as well as discussions in the forums). -- Mike

Thanks, and yes, I had previously fought my way through most of those trees but could not find the forest. :P As a newbie poking around in BridgeBase I had the feeling I was being encouraged to use FD -- indeed, I can see the utility and, like much of BB, it seems cleverly implemented. I thought I was an idiot since everyone else could apparently use the thing without any specific explanations. If this capability is a test bed and not a resource suggested for everyone, I think that needs to be better publicized. -- Mike

Is there some sort of basic tutorial or help file for the Full Disclosure capability somewhere? I understand from other posts that this is not totally supported, but I'm having trouble doing basic things, like removing conventions from the default list, or figuring out what "use" means, and whether I can "un-use" it until I get my act together, etc., etc. Thanks and, BTW, really impressed with the whole Bridge Base environment. Well done. -- Mike

Relationship of this effort to our commercial, disk-resident version 6.1.5? -- Mike