McBruce

I'm not sure I completely agree with this. Wimbledon doubles final, Smith & Smyth vs Jones and Jaunes, final set, 6-6, deuce. Smith serves, Jones makes a great return, Smyth reaches for a volley and hits it off the end of the racket, up in the air and dribbling over the net down the middle, bouncing five feet and waiting to be smashed. Jones and Jaunes both call for it, then try to call one another, then both lunge for it and dive headlong into one another and the ball hits the ground along with both players. If Smith and Smyth now congratulate one another with an audacious high five, as though this was a great strategic masterpiece brilliantly executed, they had better be a fairly low seed or the Wimbledon committee will not be inviting them back next year. Point being that one needs to be aware that wdp has the potential to sound like an insult to the opponents if they have made errors in the play. It's not the same as the automatic glp or typ. Far better to follow it up with a specific comment on what partner did well, to not give the impression that you are sticking it to the opponents.

I had my first experience at being an operator a few weeks ago at the Canadian Championships. (Actually, I only did it for about 8 boards of the 128 board final after a session of practice during the semis; we had two great people -- with a total of 7 ACBL masterpoints!! -- who enjoyed the job so much they covered both tables for most of the two days. Having preduplicated 2,858 boards by hand for the event over the past week and the month before, I was happy to watch most of the match in the hospitality room.) I don't recall a single delay resulting from any of the players leaving the table during any of the 16-board segments. In fact, we had two sessions of 16 boards where one table got only 15 boards in, so there wasn't a lot of time to take breaks. There were some lengthy breaks in the play and bidding on several occasions. (As an operator you quickly learn that these breaks are inevitably followed by some superfast tricks -- given thinking time, the cards and options become clear once the play resumes...) While I understand the concern about cheating and the hope that things can be done to eliminate the possibility, the one thing that occurs to me that doesn't seem to have gotten much airtime on this thread is this: Persistent cheating creates a footprint. If a player wins a significant number of IMPs by making anti-percentage plays, or guessing right often, or getting to miracle contracts, the trend might well be noticed--especially if there are a lot of people watching on VG. This has been the traditional way of catching cheaters, and it is not perfect, but it usually gets the job done--eventually. The Italian pair that were caught in Tenerife won the 2005 Cavendish a short time before that. My opinion is this: introducing security methods to combat cheating actually increases the awareness of potential cheating among the players and spectators. I don't think that this is a good thing at all. I certainly wouldn't want to see commentators remarking with innuendo that Bobby is certainly having a very, uh, lucky day. But I think that is almost a given if we continue to ratchet up the presence of tight security measures. Even worse is this: I suppose that the current method may not catch all cheaters, but the ones it does catch are not victims of circumstance. I have the impression that with all these extra security measures that there is a danger that somebody innocent is going to be investigated or even disqualified: and whichever one is the result, their reputation will be tarnished. Even worse, the process of reporting possible breaches of security (even privately) may become a tactic to throw an opponent off his game. You win 10 IMPs by taking a slightly antipercentage line in a contract. One of your opponents, perhaps someone who has a history with you, spends the next break talking to the TD and you have a TD or tournament official kibitzing you for the rest of the tournament. Good luck with that. A better option, I think, would be to downplay the security, but ensure that more matches are recorded on VG so that the decisions taken by players can be a matter of public record. If someone amasses a huge number of IMPs in 50-50 situations, a full record can be built up and if necessary an investigation can take place for transmission methods. The accused player will have every right to defend himself with the database of hands played from VG. As for live vs delayed vugraph, it seems obvious that delayed vugraph is not the answer. Cheaters will simply find other, more difficult to detect methods if live VG is removed. Simple procedures like piling a bunch of chairs and signs to either side of the VG operator to keep kibitzers away will work reasonably well to prevent anyone getting a view of the operator's screen. I can tell you firsthand that the instructions Roland and Fred gave to me for our team of newbie operators worked out very well. But if delayed vugraph is not the answer, what on earth is the question? Is there a feeling out there that there has been cheating going on? If you feel this way, please do the right thing and inform your NCBO (or the Director in Charge) about your suspicions, noting the boards you suspect and any other information you are aware of. And having done so, let them do what they think best, and trust in their judgment: in other words, drop it. Even worse than cheating is the grapevine of innuendo about some poor player who has no way to defend himself.

I'm looking for a second operator (or a group of people who will between them handle the live recording of bids and played cards) for the CNTC (Canadian National Teams Championship) in a few weeks. I'll handle one of the tables; we'd like to broadcast both. If you (singular or plural) are: --going to be in Penticton on June 12 and 13 but not planning to play in any of the Canadian Bridge Championship events on those days, and --have a fair knowledge of the BBO software, and --would like to donate your time to ensuring that our championship team event is broadcast from both tables, and --have access to a laptop with wireless internet access, and --understand the care required: the operator's job can be tedious but also can affect a match if the operator inadvertently gives information away to the players ("did you play the queen?"), ...please get in touch with me (because I thought I was the only person matching those requirements)! No seriously, we would very much like your help. We're not asking for you to comment on the bids and plays, we need someone to record the bids made and cards played as it happens, into a laptop, so that BBO members can watch the CNTC final online.

Were there any other TD calls in the game, or is it just this pair that doesn't call the Director? Sounds to me like you should have insisted on the TD being summoned. If the opposing pair has a problem with the TD being called (maybe they find the calling-out part rude), you should simply get up quietly and fetch him. I know where you were (I checked). It's a country club game that a few years ago changed from invitational to open and I imagine you were playing against one of the pairs who seldom plays anywhere else, and there was a forced atmosphere of civility. But at the same time, it sure sounds like it was possible that the claim might have been faulty, and you definitely need a TD to sort it out. Surely it's better to try to find some compromise rather than go away thinking that you have gotten an undeserved score. On the other hand, another possibility is that the opponent was unable to ruff as he claimed, but was trying to make the point that on another day he might have been able to. Calling the TD over would probably be embarrassing to him, but next time he'll choose his words more carefully. I'm not a big fan of opponents who say stuff like "it doesn't affect this hand, but [insert supposed infraction here]". As for the average ACBL club being "not bridge", I think it compares rather well with a random table on BBO, where I have been passed in Stayman and Blackwood on successive deals by expert partners who claim fair knowledge of SAYC.

I agree with the original post where it said "here's a mad player" -- taking the word mad to mean insane and not simply angry. This South player could have: --asked West to further explain the 2D call --asked East to give an idea of the strength of the jump to 3H --asked the opposite player the same questions to gauge how good their agreement was --passed 3H and probably go plus Instead, the South player chose to believe that North had a near opener and that E-W were talking N-S out of a game. If North actually held this kind of strength, the E-W pair were going to have trouble making ONE HEART. Full Disclosure does not spare the opponents the obligation to ask questions about announced agreements. I would probably listen to the player for awhile, then point out that he certainly has some excellent typing skills, and should probably use them whenever he needs information about a call, instead of waiting until the roof caves in and using them on the poor Director.

I have to mention that since I first posted on this topic I am on a bit of a losing streak... :)

+1520 on Board 1 (all non-vul) will get likely you in the money, but probably won't win. Actually, I suppose it might be a good rule that you have to play at least four hands, once through the vulnerability cycle.

Y'all realize that there are any number of matchpoint tactics that rubber bridge players would find insane, right? Different forms of bridge are always going to have different tactics. In this case, the tournament rules specifically state that running out the clock is completely legal. In fact, it is often a point of strategy: with 20 minutes left and from a position off the leader board, you would let the grand make and then shoot for big scores the rest of the way, because you're not going to win with the score you have.

Gotta say, I do enjoy these MBT games quite a bit. Really good addition. It is reintroducing this duplicate player to the tactics of total points, plus adding a few new wrinkles: --if you pick up a 2=1=5=5 14 count with 5 minutes left and it goes pass pass pass to you, why open? You'll just be wasting 2-4 minutes playing a hand that will likely be a small plus at best. Pass it out and take a chance on the next one. --if LHbot and RHbot bid to a grand and you are on the leaderboard with less than ten minutes left, the (legal) option of playing eleven tricks and then stopping if it's going to make is enticing. In fact, you may as well double! (If you play the 12th trick, the system will play trick 13 for you and your score will plummet.) --making GIBs system available during the auction through clicking is useful and helps to eliminate the advantage that experienced 2/1 players may have. My inclination would be NOT to add the 'human has best HCP hand' to the MBT. I don't like the idea of knowing that no player has more points than I do, especially if I am dealt a middling hand. Perhaps it would be OK in a somewhat disguised form: set up a virtual deck with four of each ace, three of each king, two of each queen, and one of each jack, ten and nine; pick a card at random and give the human player the hand with that card. Now you would often, but not always, get the best hand at the table.

At least they got the loser part right. B) At the table, I would make my normal call and get the TD later if there seemed to be damage, or especially if there seemed to be a concealed partnership understanding. If they land on their feet and you cannot, from their explanations, figure out how, there is a good chance that they have more agreements than they are divulging. Jokers who play stuff like this are often trying to bait the opponents into tempo breaks and questions to help them infer who has the missing strength. Your best bet is to make your normal bid in tempo and call the TD later if the result might have been different had the explanations been better.

It sounds from your comment like this was offline bridge, and the TD made the decision on the spot. In this part of the world (ACBL, British Columbia, Canada) TDs who care to attend the free seminars given by Matt Smith and other Regional Directors are advised never to make a judgment decision on the spot. You get the facts, have the players obtain a result, and tell the players you will look at it when you have enough time. If some bidding judgment is called for, this allows you time to ask a few players who have already played the hand or won't play it in the movement, to give their opinion. In this case, where the question is one of analysis, it is easier to see with the full hand that whatever South's claim was, he took an inferior line. The comment I think deserves a warning, not a procedural penalty. You do have the right to think and to ask questions, and I think you have a reasonable excuse to do so on this auction. It would be quite a different question if your eventual pass did not end the auction, for now your partner faces considerable difficulties. It sounds to me like declarer was frustrated at going down one and claimed to be misled without really looking at the position. The claim after the fact that he would have led the jack from dummy instead of low to the king, which is what I assume happened, seems self-serving: it's a guess, and the fact that you thought about balancing says virtually nothing about the distribution of high-cards. 13-7 is well within the parameters. And twenty minutes after the hand, a good TD would be able to explain to both pairs the decision and the reason for it. Both pairs would probably have cooled down by now somewhat and would respect the TD more for taking the time to come to a reasoned decision. That's why we shouldn't make immediate judgment calls.

Getting back to the original question... If your partnership agreement is that opener can rebid 2♦ after a forcing notrump, with 6!=2-3-2 (the ! signifies a strong six-carder) and take the risk that it might be passed, knowing that it seldom will be, it cannot possibly matter that the ACBL defines this as a natural bid because you are bidding a minor of 3+ cards. You have an unusual inference available--opener does not deny rebiddable spades. This is highly unexpected to a huge number of players. The opponents are entitled to this information, unless you enjoy arguing with TDs and ACs. (If you do, a suspension is in your future.) I believe failing to alert here, forcing or not, is an infraction. If partner later rebids spades and still there is no alert that the diamond call may be short, this is a concealed partnership understanding and a serious warning at the very least is called for. And if you are about to reply something along the lines of "2/1 is the world's most popular system, this sequence is general bridge knowledge," I remind you that BBO is an international site where a sizable majority do not play 2/1.

Shall we then have different rules for pick-up partnerships? If this pair gets a good score after checking their agreements through table chat and the opponents have no problem, is this OK? Of course not! What about the pair at another table that loses the tournament by a matchpoint because of the extra help given to the pick-up partnership? They didn't even have a chance to object. Depending on the N-S hands I would adjust to 4♠-3, possibly doubled if one of the defenders had a decent trump stack. E-W would be advised that such table talk is not allowed, whether the opponents object or not. Pick-up partnerships have an advatange in that they have more situations where they can legitimately claim 'no agreement' when opponents ask. It's not fair to allow them to decide their agreements on the spot!

Uday, a skilled and experienced programmer like yourself should have no trouble parsing this as a computer would. For myself, I need to consult the Perl cheatsheet I have on the wall, which has 'and' way down in the second-last position of precedence...but ahead of 'or', which is tied for dead last (with 'xor', whatever that may be).* This means that the Perl compiler at least would put the first brackets around (5Cs and 4cd major), and the sentence would match the intended meaning. :) I don't think I would adjust. Whatever the guidelines of international offline tournaments, online is a special animal. We have UI-less ways of asking opponents to clarify their meaning. In offline bridge, the confused opponent would have to verbally ask one of the opponents to clarify, with the possibility of creating UI for his partner. Online, we simply send a private message and against actively ethical players the mystery is cleared up fairly quickly. So my take on this one is that I would ask the defender/plaintiff why he did not simply ask privately for a clarification--a question to which there probably isn't a good answer. The 2♣ opener would be advised to be more clear in future, but I wouldn't change the score. Here's a thought: if your agreement is that a 2♣ opener promises a 4cd major only if the clubs are five long, why is it so important to divulge this immediately? Why not wait and explain this later, when the rebid confirms only five? One might get the impression that a rebid of clubs denies a four-card major, which is not true, is it? * Perl gurus will note that most Perl-ers will never use 'and' or 'or,' instead using '&&' or '||' respectively, since these forms have much higher precedence. But even then, '&&' outranks '||'... :)

You hold East's hand: xx xxx xx KQxxx You hear 1♥ on your left, pass from partner, and 2♣ on your right. You are entitled to the opponents agreements. But since 2♣ on 3+ is defined as "natural" by the ACBL GCC, you are not entitled to an alert. And here is the point. If you ask any of the questions above, partner will not be able to lead a club against 6NT without hearing an immediate call for the TD. If you were given an alert and asked, the UI situation would be far less obvious. Surely we're not going to argue that East has to double with this hand to get the lead he wants. Partner has passed and the opponents are in a 2/1 auction. 2♣ redoubled making several overtricks is not a result I want to risk. How does 3+ differ from 4+? "Natural and expected" here is that responder's clubs are 4+ and clubs is the responder's longest or tied-for-longest suit (unless he has big-time trump support and will show that later). The possibility to bid 2♣ on xxx is highly unexpected to most players. It's a legal loophole which reduces the chance of a club lead against 6NT. That's a major difference.

A short-term incentive, perhaps. But Pair 1 is going to take a single hit and then alert the call from then on, even if technically it is unalertable. What do they lose? Nobody is ever going to rule against them in the more common spot where the opponents lead a club and dummy has ♣AKQxx: they have alerted a special agreement which clearly affects the meaning of the 2♣ call. Pair 2, who have decided to claim psyche every time they are accused of a CPU, is going to get away with it a few times, but eventually--especially if they have some success--their repeated lies about this and similar situations are going to land them in Buratti-Lanzarotti land. The rules of any competitive game are always going to have loopholes that unethical players can exploit. Sportsmanship is about declining to take advantage of these loopholes and playing the game within the rules not as written, but as intended. I can't see any possible way to argue that the Laws of Duplicate Bridge intend that a player should lie to a Tournament Director if he will gain by it.

I got this one wrong because of the GCCs dubious definition of 'natural.' The notion that you can have a special 5+ agreement about 2♦/1♥, but bidding 2♣/1♥, which is greatly affected by this special agreement, is somehow 'natural' and unalertable, is not exactly keeping with the full disclosure principle. I think the ACBL definition of natural should be better defined in the charts, maybe to make all two-level natural responses 4+, which is what most players will expect on a 2/1 auction.

Perhaps I'm in a lazy mood, but I don't really want to give this one (or any similar one) a lot of thought until I get complete details: --what was the nature of the complaint? --what reasons did the TD give for adjusting? Without these questions answered, all is speculation, but it sounds like the N-S pair got railroaded by a TD who took a complaint privately and adjusted without giving a reason. It also seems that N-S didn't do much to elicit an explanation for the adjustment. However, I don't want to conclude anything without all the details. Tell us!

hrothgar: "One additional point: Maybe I read too much Mollo, however, my immediate suspicion was that North was thinking of bidding slam decided to psyche 2♣ in order to deter the lead. North / South could have easily avoid an adjusted score if they had offered this defense... I'm always very uncomfortable when a score adjustment hinges on the verbiage that the offending side uses to justify their actions." You're suggesting that if the explanation for 2♣ given by N-S seems to be incriminating, a TD should consider that perhaps they have a better excuse? This attitude encourages players to respond to any TD query with "it was a psyche" in order to escape trouble. I don't think we should be encouraging lying to the TD at all. As many others have stated, this case is fairly simple in jurusdictions where 12C3 is enabled, allowing an adjustment to a split score when the result is not certain. ACBL and BBO's tournaments do not allow such an adjustment. In that constricting scenario, I would give N-S average minus. Three small (could it possibly be two small?) clubs as a possible hand for this auction is an unusual system detail the opponents ought to be entitled to, whatever the alert requirements in force say. I don't much like the spade lead from Kxxx against 6NT, but I don't think it comes up to the level required to claim that E-W were "not playing bridge." Give them average plus. Start looking for committee members...

Not so fast! If the 12 opposite 11 was still enough to make 9+ tricks in notrump unassailable, as it often is, I would not adjust anything. :P But yes, passing a forcing bid that is itself not a bid that a SAYC would make is a clear violation. The issue here is that when players are limited to SAYC, it is unfair to allow one table to gain by not following the rules. You may think that the limit is a fatal flaw; that is perfectly fair. But I think that given the limits on TDs in the BBO software, the inability of many pairs to communicate their systemic agreements, and the difficulty in weeding out online cheats, this is the least problematic format for an online tournament. I read this forum and saw the problems people were having and decided on a format that would control things and make it fairly simple for me and for players. My personal opinion is that those who think limited-system games are not bridge have a very inflated opinion of the effectiveness of conventions: a good player should be able to win as often (maybe more often) playing SAYC in a SAYC-only field--and the records from the series pretty much proved this. I guess I lost some players by following these rules, but I think I gained more by actually having rules, advertising them constantly, and sticking to them. There were actually very few situations where I had to make an adjustment for a non-SAYC bid: far more often I was able to rule that the infraction didn't change the result and give the offending side a warning.

In a SAYC-only individual, a format I used to run, I had this rule: If a bid has been made which is obviously not part of SAYC, AND the partner of the bidder 'fielded' this by taking an action which a SAYC player would probably not take, an adjustment will be made if the Director is called at the proper time. If the player making the improper bid is the dummy you should call before playing to trick two. If defender or declarer, you should call as soon as you know that there has been BOTH an improper bid and a responding non-standard action. I will adjust to the least favourable result for the offending side that might reasonably have been obtained if the non-SAYC bid had been treated as SAYC. This sets an additional requirement to helene_t's list: the partner of the non-standard bid must have taken an unusual action, suggesting a non-SAYC agreement. It also allows the TD not to rule in cases where the non-offenders have discovered the non-standard bid and tried to get a better result instead of calling immediately.

OK, I think you can do this in the following way: Click on the Lobby button while seated at a tourney table. This will bring up the list of people logged on to BBO. Scroll through them to find the TD and move the mouse over the name. You should get a yellow box telling you that person's current location.

Something tells me that Fred won't have a problem adding this flag in, after all I assume the flag of Ireland is already included... :blink:

This is a growing problem with many of us buying the wide-screen displays. At least BBO has not done what many other companies have: stretch everything to fit. The EA Sports golf game is nice windowed, but full screen on my display I am hitting what looks like a small oval shaped object.... :blink:

I'm not qualified to answer for BBO management, but I would guess that they would strongly prefer that TDs NOT play in their own tournaments. If doing so puts them out of range to messages from the lobby, there is a simple way to fix this problem: stop playing. I have directed dozens of tournaments and have often spent time chatting with players not in the tournament as it ran. Mind you, TDing can be a busy activity and TDs won't always have the time to chat. But it can be done. All you have to do is not play.