DrTodd13

In my regular partnerships it is asking if pd has two fast club losers.

Please tell me you are joking. You want to politicize the distribution of rain? Your country not doing enough against global warming? No rain for you! This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard.

Greatest conspiracy is to lead us to believe that government is the solution to our problems rather than the cause.

It is probably closer to the following: P1 - Let's play NMF. P2 - I don't know it...how does it work? P1 - If I bid a new minor over 1N rebid, you bid 2M if you have 3 card support. P2 - Ok...got it. [table dissolves and new one begins 5 minutes later] P2 - Hi pd...let's play NMF. Disaster and argument ensues as more examples unfold of people who know about 1/10th of a convention but think they know it all.

NMF denies this hand. Look at Root and Pavlicek's discussion of NMF in Modern Bridge Conventions. The sequence you suggest is strictly invitational and not game forcing since you have this 3♥ bid available and didn't use it. I knew when this problem was posted that the lamentation was over whether or not to bid 7. Why isn't partner opening 1N with his hand? For hands like this, your NT range is important since it shows what the 1N rebid is. I'm not too worried about missing 7 with a 12-14 pd. 6 is usually enough as you found. I think if partner supports ♥ as he does here you have nice cue-bidding or RKC sequences to find 7.

Did my pd open 1♦ and respond 1N or did LHO open 1♦ and RHO bid 1N? If it is the latter then my RHO is crazy and I'm going to bid 5♦, exclusion blackwood. If my pd has just bid 1NT then I will bid 3♥, game forcing with 5+♥. If pd retreats to 3N then I bid 5♠. Pd should get the 6♠, 5♥ picture and bid 6 of a major with any reasonably fitting hand. If partner support hearts then I'll just start cue-bidding.

For the thousandth time, your suggestion is a non-solution. There is a seemingly infinite supply of idiots and jerks. I have a huge enemies list and still encounter many new additions to it everyday. You can waste your time all day long in MBC dealing with these people. Not having to deal with them again is good but new ones will just take their place. You need a way to preempt playing with these people in the first place and only the equivalent of bad word-of-mouth is going to do it.

The server and the client are single-threaded. DB systems are optimized for this sort of stuff. There are much more complicated servers than bridge servers. Don't worry about what effect this has on the server. Just worry about how much people like the results.

Typing long code sequences is a pretty small part of the average programmer's day. Answer 4) In one sense, there is no such thing as "the same time." Only one ratings request can arrive at any instant of time. If the machine I was using had more than one processor then I might have used both of them which would have required a locking mechanism of some variety but as it was the application is single-threaded so no locking was required. Also, you really expect 5000 people to be rating the same specific individual at nearly the same time? There may be many ratings requests floating around at a time but most will be for different users. Answer 5) The performance of the algorithm I developed is proportional to the number of ratings for the person. The cost per rating is only a few instructions plus a couple memory references. I can't give an estimate throughput until you tell me the average number of ratings per person. Back of the envelop computation for 100 ratings per person and 500 cycles per rating would be around 500,000 people's ratings computed per second. If ratings processing became too costly then just do it once per day or once per week. As it is, I don't see the problem with doing it inline. I know it is not as simple as I make it sound but there was some intimation that doing this is months worth of effort. All I'm saying is that I don't think it necessarily has to be that long.

Waste of time? I wrote my own bridge system that I tinker with occasionally and I implemented this feature. It took less than a day to implement. I'm even willing to give the core of the ratings code to Fred. So, I don't think this is a huge time sink. Really? One day? How much time do you think it will take to integrate into BBO? Did you think of: 1) What UI needs to be given, to show the users rating, means to vote etc and how much time it will take to code it? 2) Do you need to change the client server protocol? What changes need to be made? How much time will that take? 3) Other issues like: Say the user clicked on "Rate player" and waited 3 days before actually making a rating. Will it's weight be more/less, what? Writing code to calculate new rating etc is pretty trivial, the harder part is to actually get the whole scenario working as a proper feature. You misunderstand me. I did _everything_ in one day...the core of the ratings calculation, the UI changes, display each person's rating in their profile, modifying the client/server protocol, etc. The idea though was that one day was a ballpark estimate and I engineered my system to make changes like this easy so it may be different for BBO depending on how they have organized their code and what GUI tools they are using. However, I wouldn't suspect this type of change to be particularly huge for any bridge system. To answer your third question, the way I did my code was that ratings weight degrades over time (non-linearly). The length of time is calculated since you last played with that person and had nothing to do with when you actually rated them. The idea being that you aren't getting new information in the interim so your rating should be based on the last time you did get new information.

I guess Fred should be spending his time trying to figure out how to stop people from psyching then because that is what people seem to want most of all. Seriously though, sometimes you have to lead and not just react to what people think they want. Trying to play in the MBC with random players is a nightmare. That is my experience as a BBO member. I don't know if people would have suggestions on how to fix this but if Fred could come up with even a halfway solution it would be great. The solution of "get a circle of friends and only play with them" doesn't work a good portion of the time and I'd say that is true for many other people.

This poll makes the mistake of believing that all ratings system are the same and produce the same effects. If you want to separate out reputation-based systems from ratings systems that is fine with me but in general there are two types of ratings, objective and subjective. Objective ratings computed with a formula do tend to create a somewhat more hostile environment but not as much as think many here believe. Subjective ratings I think have potential to eliminate many of the negatives of an objective ratings system in that you can rate playing ability and "niceness" separately. If someone is a jerk then their niceness rating will go down and hopefully they will want to improve this by being nicer.

What do I have wrong? First off, it would be called a utopia if people didn't like it so this is just another way of saying a libertarian or anarchist utopia is impossible. I totally admit that barring a miraculous change in human nature that this is true. However, given that no form of government is stable, I feel totally free to prefer a societal organization that I believe minimizes the systematic violation of rights. At this point, politicians just like power and they reward those who put them in power. They have two bases...those who give them the campaign money and those who give them the votes. The former are rich and the latter masses are comparatively poor so the government plays a gigantic shell game of taking from and giving to everyone in an attempt to make everyone feel as if they are a beneficiary. Of course, we all know that this is impossible and as Helene illustrates that if the cost of government were easily seen by people that they would revolt. The lowest 50% of wage earners benefit and the very highest of the financial elites benefit and everyone else in the middle is a net loser but hey...they are a minority so this is democrazy in action is it not?

I used to play Purple Two's which is like Myxo on steroids. I played them with a few people but mainly on OKb. I don't play much with Gerard anymore and I think he's the only other one that plays them who is on BBO regularly. The notes for them are on my bridge webpage.

Perot got about 17% the first time he ran. The terrible truth is that people won't vote for someone who hasn't been deemed "legitimate" and to be "legitimate" you have to have raised 50+ million dollars. The politicians are then beholden to their contributors. The sad fact is that charm and attractiveness and name recognition amount to a lot and while each candidate goes on and on about how different they are, in reality there is very little difference even between Democrats and Republicans. Another sad fact is the human nature drives politics. An elite can stage a coup but if they then setup a system that is in conflict with human nature it will eventually collapse. If you try to make everyone equal then nobody sees any reason to try to achieve and so your society collapses from lack of productivity. If you try to establish a completely free society then some people will excel and others will fail and people will start to say this "luck of the birth draw" is not fair and so you start back down the road to socialism. Ultimately, people's covetousness drives them to want to live (partially or wholly) off others rather than accepting what they have. When people realize they can vote for people who will give them stuff then the system will start to collapse. In the US, over 50% of people receive a significant portion of their income from government. This number is projected to rise to 60% within 10 years I believe. Are these people ever going to vote libertarian? I seriously doubt it. Political expediency will stop any true social security or medicare reform. We have unfunded liabilities in this country of 60 trillion dollars. That is over $500,000 per household. Taxes will never cover this number. If you try to inflate to solve the problem you'll have hyperinflation and the economy will collapse. Will we default on our debt? Will we eliminate these programs when they become a burden or severely curtail them? I don't know what they are going to do but I find it probably that our current form of government won't survive this 800-pound gorilla.

Wow. A lot of stuff here to digest. The problem with questions like "how should we reform health care" is that the answer depends totally on what one values most and who the "one" is that gets to make the decision. Do we want to minimize health care costs? Do we want to maximize care? Is the "ideal" some tradeoff and if so who sets it? We have a mechanism for making such decisions and it is called the market. Unfortunately, the system is currently engineered almost to eliminate market forces. First, a positive of our system is speed of care. You hear horror stories from Canada about ridiculously long waits for treatment which is an indication of price controls. Price controls always lead to scarcity. The big negative of our system is its cost. There are several reasons as I see it. First, demand is sky high. For any commodity, if the price is invisible the demand will soar and so will the underlying cost. Low deductibles increase demand for health care because after a point you are spending somebody else's money...at least that is how people see it. What they don't realize is there is no free lunch and they or someone else is paying for it somehow. Second, government interference for things like drug imports. Drugs are cheaper elsewhere than they are in the country they are produced. There is no reason for this other than limits on market forces. Third, the focus on treatment rather than prevention. There isn't as much money to be made in prevention as there is in treatment. Fourth, malpractice insurance probably adds a lot to the cost of care. We need to find someway of addressing exorbitant lawsuit awards. For me, not being a slave is important and as such being forced to pay for someone else's health care I find offensive. In an ideal world, everybody would pay for their own health care. If I could wave a magic wand and convince people the best thing to do, here is what I'd do. Eliminate all government regulation of everything health and drug related. Convince everyone to only carry catastrophic health care insurance so that they see the cost of routine care and so competition will drive prices down. Convince people to eat less and exercise more.

Fred, I am wondering about the correctness of someone giving a description of a bid as "this hand type or almost any other hand type." Isn't it almost certain that in practice "almost any other hand type" is really two or three specific hand types and that others are excluded? Isn't the principle that any question triggers full disclosure and that they shouldn't have to ask you what other hand types the "almost any other hand type" can actually be? The 3♦ bid may be a real HSGT, an advance cue-bid, or a worthless dub or trip attempting to deter a lead. How many other options do you actually use and what is the problem will listing these options?

Most people get the concepts of right/wrong and legal/illegal all mixed up. They think that everything wrong should be illegal. For me, one example of something wrong that is legal is kicking someone from your table. If you "own" the table you should be able to ask them to leave or just plain kick them for any reason or no reason. However, if you do so, it doesn't mean what you've done is socially acceptable. Someone has joined a table with every expectation that the rules of bridge are in effect only to find later that law 40 doesn't apply. If you sit down and the host says "law 40 replaced here with 'thou shalt not psyche'" and you psyche anyway then you deserve to get kicked. If I get kicked for being 60 and Chinese then I have no recourse other than to spread the word that the person who kicked me is an ageist and racist.

Says who? If by shouldn't remove someone you mean you shouldn't just boot them then that's true, but you have every right to ask them to leave (and then boot them if they don't comply) for any reason at all, even a petty one and even with no prior warning. I can't say it makes me like the person who did this, but it's their right. When I said they "can't" I meant they "shouldn't." Just like if I say I can't come up and punch you in the face it means that I shouldn't even though I'm perfectly capable of doing it. If they forget to say they don't allow psyches then it would be proper to tell them at their first psyche that you don't allow that at your table but since you forgot to tell them you can't blame them. Sure, if you're an ass then you can kick them right then and there but likewise I have a right to dislike that person for being an ass.

First, if you don't alert people when they join your table that you don't allow psyches then you shouldn't be able to later say you don't tolerate psyches and remove someone for the first instance of such a bid. If you and your partner regularly make this bid, you should say "3♦ may be a help-suit or a worthless doubleton (or tripleton, whatever)". It doesn't make any sense to say "this 3♦ is a help-suit or a psyche" because A) every bid could be a psyche and :lol: you have in essence a specific set of things that it will usually be. The opps are just sourpusses here. You make a trial bid and then continue on to game. This usually means that either you were interested in slam if partner liked your suit or you made the help-suit try with shortness and upon finding that partner has no wasted values in this suit you bid game anyway. Most of the time it is the latter so opps should really think about leading ♦ when you bid like this.

I don't care what they think of my game but that is not the purpose of this kind of a ratings system. The purpose is that other people care about what other people think of my game. If I'm looking for experts for a table and a self-rated expert tries to sit down whose "reputation" is intermediate then that person isn't getting a seat. In broad terms, I think people would do a reasonable job. Are you suggesting to me that you can't play 10 hands with someone and get a general idea of what level they are at? No that is not what I am suggesting. I am not an average BBO member. Fred Gitelman Bridge Base Inc. www.bridgebase.com It makes sense to not allow someone who is intermediate to rate someone world class but I think that even intermediates know the difference between beginner and intermediate and "something better than me."

I don't care what they think of my game but that is not the purpose of this kind of a ratings system. The purpose is that other people care about what other people think of my game. If I'm looking for experts for a table and a self-rated expert tries to sit down whose "reputation" is intermediate then that person isn't getting a seat. In broad terms, I think people would do a reasonable job. Are you suggesting to me that you can't play 10 hands with someone and get a general idea of what level they are at?

So you are saying that people on ebay have no reason to give a seller a good rating if the transaction goes smoothly? I find your suggestion totally without proof. All the proof I see says the opposite. People on ebay do rate sellers as good when there is no motivation for them to do so other than having a reputation system that is useful. The peer rating system was one big reason why ebay was successful. People immediately realized its usefulness and appreciated it and use it.

How often do you play 50 boards with someone and only then decide they are a moron? I think that most of the "my pd is an idiot" is after playing a few hands, getting a terrible result and then they leave. As such, the "idiot" ratings will be mitigated by the small number of boards played with that person. Likewise, you need to cap someone's contribution to a max number of boards otherwise two people can play with each other all the time and rate each other WC. You'd also need to see the total number of distinct ratings to be able to determine whether the rating was trustworthy. This is just like Ebay's system. You see how many ratings a person has and what the average is.

Why assume that? It will take a long time to achieve 'advanced' status if you play mainly with beginners. Especially if many of those beginners are self-perceived experts who are convinced that all bidding disasters are partner's fault. And much easier to achieve 'advanced' status if you play with people who know you (and like you) in person. When you're getting rated by your opps and kibitzers, you don't have those biases, or at least much less of them. Somewhat off-topic: If you really want a rating system, let it be based on indy's and/or play with GIB only. There could be a pair-rating system based on pair tourneys and/or pairs playing against two GIBs as well. And there could be a peer-rating system for social skills rather than social skills, allthough I don't think that would be a good idea either. Then again, most people, including me and (much more importantly) including Fred, don't want a rating system at all, other than what is allready available (stars, self-rating, the amount of money won in pay tourneys). Certainly, partner should rate. The opponents should get to rate too but perhaps at a slightly lower weight. The purpose of such a system is not to judge your true ability in an established partnership. The purpose of such a system should be to determine how likely it is that you will enjoy playing with someone else for the first time. I absolutely don't believe a ratings system should be based on play with GIB. You could know the GIB system well but be totally incapable of handling ambiguous situations that may arise with real people. What is the difference between an Indy and the MBC?