bluecalm

Yeah, maybe it would be more useful to pull hands where 1H was overcalled while there were 8 spades on the line to see if there are potential gain there and how often that happens. I will try that when I am back home.

I don't think there will be much discussion here. 5♥ should be common choice. It's also mine.

Funny, I think pass is absolutely terrible. Both dbl and 2S are fine imo leaning slightly towards dbl.

All hands where one side overcalled 1H and the other doubled with 4-5-x-y shape after 1m opening from 100k hand vugraph database (many minor events purged): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/86311885/ELCpart0.lin (open room always dbls) Grand total of one swing (6 imps) was won because of spades being found after dbl and not being found after 1H overcall. This is not completely fair because maybe more such swings were missed on hands where both sides overcalled 1H (not included here) but still 1/46 doesn't look very convincing. Enjoy :)

It's not about cheating. It might make some sense to play suit preference here. Maybe because the spades weren't raised and the opponent are only in game (thus suggesting some hcp for E). Maybe it's not obvious if this particular situation qualifies for such treatment. If you play slowly you alert partner that you might be treating this as one of those situations. Imo this is UI and the information is that you might be giving suit preference. There are many players (including very reasonable ones) who never open 2M with 5 card suit.

Now I want to see a hand when it's close because of revealed holding in a side suit... What about this one: [hv=pc=n&s=sa2hakq432d765ct2&n=s43hjt9dakq8ckqj9&d=w&v=0&b=8&a=2sd3s4hp5hp6hppp]266|200[/hv] The lead is Q♠. You draw trumps in two rounds then play AK of diamonds and two honors drops on the right ! Does restricted choice matter now ? What about if the trumps were 3-1 with 3 in opener's hand ? Your play ? :)

There is certain kind of players: -long time members -people who value their time and don't want to waste it on activities they don't enjoy -people who due to other commitments can't choose their playing time freely (in order to play in other tournaments) Those are the kind of people most valuable to BBO as they are most likely (or already had) spent money on BBO. Those are people you don't really want to get discouraged and I am sure the management will get that. What happened today is you annoyed me (someone who already spent some money on BBO and is most likely to spend it on any new services you introduce) and someone who is in the group I described. In other words: your most valuable customers. In response we get: "if you waste 6-8 hours every 2 months on activity you don't really enjoy the annoyance will go away". Can we have someone responsible for that in this thread then ? It doesn't take much intellectual effort to see at least some quick fixes to this TCR thing so discussing real solutions is pointless now as the problem is somewhere else. We first need to have someone responsible for that to realize mistake they made and committing them to fixing that.

I don't want to play those. It's not a video game, there is social aspect to bridge and sometimes there is an opportunity to play with someone you rarely have chance to play with. It's not like I will be able to stop time, waste 6-8 hours playing with random people and then jump back in time to be able to play with someone I wanted to and who is rarely available. Even if that would be possible it still won't save the day if the other person play rarely. I suggest you rethink your attitude. It ruins the experience for long term, well behave members (as nigel_k said) and for people who don't play much. There are better ways to achieve a goal of excluding bad apple kind of players. I would be happy to suggest some but first I would like to understand the kind of problems it causes and realize that your suggestion of "just play 10 fast tourneys" sounds a bit arrogant if you are on the other side of this TCR thing and just had your social/bridge opportunity ruined by this idea.

Thank you for this explanation. I would like to express my disappointment by this idea. If you want to create a tool to help TD's with people who used to not complete tournaments there must be better way. I don't play many tournaments I am certainly not going to play with robots etc. On the other hand I have an account on bbo forever, I complete almost everything I play and I played tons of hands, I am a member of many private clubs for tourneys and there never were any complaints, I have my name in the profile and I play with people with similar characteristics. If a tool causes TD's to not accept me even if they didn't see me before in their tourneys there is something very wrong with that. I might be wrong on that as 60 is a lot of days but I doubt I played 30 open tournaments during that period unless you count tm's. That might be the case though, it just seems unlikely to me (I have bad memory for such things though). :( Is it really that bad idea to assume people are good customers till they screw up instead of having them earn the right to play ? Especially people who have accounts forever and played thousands of hands in other forms of bridge. If more TD's start using this TCR thing then I will not be able to get TCR because I don't have TCR yet which is basically situation which came up today. Another thing is that I wanted to play with someone who completes much more tournaments and probably have TCR established. You could take that into account too. Also here is what you said in the other thread: I don't play open tournaments, I prefer other forms of bridge. It's not hard to complete 10 tournaments but why would I ever do that if they are not my favourite form of bridge ? On the other hand sometimes people are usually play with are not online or someone I know invites me to play in a tournament. It really ruin the experience if we can't play because some random ratio someone thought would be good idea to restrict people on. It tilts me to read that quote. If it's so easy to achieve then people you want out will easily achieve it too but honest, well behaving players will be restricted.

I know something about this system because of my reverse engineering efforts and I would be happy to participate in discussions about specific situations. I am not aware of anywhere on the net when you can get (or buy) any reliable information on this though. All links I saw are usually wild guesses and not what they really play :(

There is something TD's call TCR and they use it to ban players from tournaments. Today I encountered this tryign to play in one tournament. As I don't run from tournametns and I think I didn't finish about 3 of them during almost 10 years of playing on BBO there must be some kind of mistake there. I also almost never play open tournaments and I can't recall one case of not finishing them this year. Could you please check the algorithm or give some more info on that ? It's pretty annoying to be randomly banned and not to know the reason. One thing I can think of are tm's which we often don't finish (when people start leaving you might be stuck in them for half an hour or something if TD is not responsive) but I hope they don't count to that, also I finish at least 90% of my tm's and I leave from them before everybody else decide to probably less than 5%. It would truly suck if those influence tournaments play.

It is decent game in the context which is that parnter has super minimum and wouldn't think of accepting any invites. Despite that game has very good chances of making.

Are you in troll mode ? It wouldn't be down but obviously Helgemo couldn't know partner has super minimum and will pass 2N with 6 spades. WTF?

I don't doubt that it's better than gambling but I think gambling is a good convention in a sense that on suitable hands opening 3N is better than other options. It's very rare though.

Yeah, I suck at addition. I thought it's 64 to 27 not 64 to 54.

[hv=pc=n&s=saq3hkt6daj86ca76&d=n&v=0&b=1&a=1sp2cp2sp2np3cp3sp3np4cp4dp]133|200[/hv] 2♣ = gf clubs or bal 3♣ = 5spades - 4 clubs and 12-14hcp 3♠ = set spades 3NT = minimum (total junk bids 4S) 4C/4D = cuebids Are we forcing slam now ? Or maybe 4♥ and pass if partner doesn't go beyong 4S is enough ?

He meant it as an game try I am pretty sure. Helness should know that and didn't leave partner in 2N with his 6carder. 3NT is quite decent game on this hand despite partner holding minimum.

I actually did a lot of this. Admittedly my methods wasn't very scientific (just deal a lot of hands and go through them one by one trying to guess what would happen) but it influences my strong opinion about those situations which is that giving away information is more important than any gains you may have from fancy stuff. We will know the answer once the computers are good at bridge and we will have very good guess once they are decent. I suspect that even today if Jack's authors were willing to release a tool to analyzing such situations (or just API to let Jack play given layout with given info so other programmers could use it for taking care of bidding part) it would answer a lot of questions of this nature.

Just play 2S as clubs and 3C as diamonds and 3D as invitational diamonds (as there is no room for super accept) leaving your 1N - 2N for natural invite. I do that with everybody I play with and it works great. Bidding an invite via stayman is very bad, because: -they can double 2C/take clues from lack of it -you give them free information about majors suits in opener hand which will be declaring Alternative is 2S = clubs or balanced invite. It's worse than my structure because they can double 2S on the way to 3N and you play clubs from worse hand opposite minimum but it leaves you one of the 2N/3C bid if you want to use it as puppet stayman or w/e.

I don't want to ignore it. I say that if you play low or high here is just matter of agreement and I am to pick one I prefer leading an 8 from K82 (and have a 2 as suit preference for diamnods). No, you don't. Signalling hearts is pointless here so signal to heart just denies interest in diamonds (and thus suggest interest in continuing clubs). It has the exact same merits as attitude. You just need an agreement.

Why ? If anything I would like to play a high card from say Q9x just in case declarer has K8x and partner AJTxx or w/e. I mean, with the exception of this (and maybe some similar) unlikely layout when high card is better it just matter of agreement. Why do you think a low one "should" show a desire to tap dummy and not the other way around ? I am used to playing that we always give lavi in those situations and never attitude lead. Similarly I am used to always giving either attitude in a led suit or suit preference to the other suit never "discourage to encourage switch". I don't believe bridge logic suggests one or the other you just have to have those agreemens with your partner or you are just guessing. (one great example of such guessing gone wrong is Narkiewicz-Buras blunder vs Italians in recent WMSG semifinal)

Same but I would expect 2♣ to be more readable for partner. I am used to lavinthals instead of attitude leads in those situations (obviously the merits of both agreements are the same, you just need to know what partner expects).

I am honestly not convinced. Here is an interesting link: http://www.rpbridge.net/9x16.htm Small sample to be sure but something to think about. I surely hope he did, that's the whole idea of this style imo.

I think there is a lot of merit to this style. Sometimes you shut them down, sometimes you nail them for a number. Is it better than standard 1H opening ? I have no idea.

I specifically said it's not a proof. It is however a very strong argument, especially when we talk about full time players and especially the ones willing to work on/change system things. I believe people like that (Meckwell, top Italian pairs, top Netherland pairs and some more from various countries). If not a single pair from this group plays 1D as 3+ despite coming from various backgrounds there is probably something to it as they showed willingness to work on system a lot and naturally they choose what they think is best (even if it's very small % of their overall playing strength). We have no way of proving those things and looking at what the best bidders play is one of the best ways to improve our guesses about what works and what doesn't.