DrTodd13

I think you're being pretty pompous here. You've never tried this method and you're trying to tell me it is unplayable even though I've played it for a long time and haven't really had any problems with it. Having all even spots or odd spots certainly does restrict your options but in that case, we have a fallback plan. In that case, we revert to upside-down attitude. You can choose not to believe me but I'm telling you that looking at your own spots, dummy's spots and declarer's card you can make a pretty good guess whether pd has only even or odd spots. Ask the people that watch me and foobar play and see what they have to say.

I don't understand your point at all. I have 18 points and partner opens. Whenever I get a chance to bid I am going to bid something. Partner doesn't know whether I was considering passing or considering something else so he can't make any inferences about my hand type. I make a bid so we can have a normal auction. There are really no tempo issues if a bid is made. If I have a connection problem and have a hand where I almost have enough to bid but not quite and then partner decides now is the time to take a flier due to my hesitation then he should be punished. He doesn't know whether it is a connection problem or me thinking so he must do the ethical thing and assume that I was thinking. I suggest to you that the laws of bridge are inconsistent with your position here. We do not try to determine why someone failed to follow suit. We only punish them for doing so. Who gets punished by such a rule? Only those who do it accidentally. Why? Because those who might consider doing it intentionally know that it won't pay to try it and so no one does it intentionally. The rule is effective, it stops would-be cheaters at the expense of an innocent person occasionally suffering. The "penalty" imposed when there is a hesitation is even less arduous than a trick penalty. Partner just can't take any fliers after a huddled pass. I don't see why enforcing that rule is such a big deal. People might even get good results out of it. You say you don't want people to hesitate yet have a policy that makes it impossible to discourage hesitations. I _really_ don't want people acting on hesitations and the way to stop it is to enforce the rule. The "ole black magic" is out of the bag once again and will continue to multiply (and teach people bad habits) until it becomes so much of a problem that you change your mind.

I play it and it has proven useful. In my experience, it is no worse than other mechanisms when you have a limited number of cards but provides more info when you have cards to spare. Q872 is a perfect example. 7 is encouraging. 8 says lead the high suit. 2 says lead the low suit.

Let me ask you this, why the trick penalty for failing to follow suit? When people don't follow suit, why don't you just ask them why they failed to follow suit and if they say they had their hand missorted then you just restore equity but don't assign a trick penalty? Why is it that nowhere else in the laws does it suggest that director ask someone a question and then always accept their answer as truthful? I would rather have a system where there is some way to penalize the guilty (they inevitably deny being guilty) with the sad fact that the non-guilty will sometimes get a result they don't deserve than have a system where it is impossible to punish the guilty because you can't prove that they were intentionally manipulating the system. Yes, tempo issues are difficult and require polling which is time consuming and complicated but the laws demand that tempo issues be addressed.

Inadvertently varying your tempo is not cheating prearranging to use your tempo to convey different messages about your calls is cheating. Is something really a law (and breaking it therefore cheating) if the enforcement agency has no means to enforce it nor will they ever try to? I agree with you. Prearranging to use tempo to convey info SHOULD BE cheating. Even making use of partner's huddle is also cheating. Right now, the ACBL has given carte blanche to both. I believe their decision to treat all delays as connection problems or bathroom breaks is seriously flawed. All delays should be treated as huddles with the exception of where you get the red dot. If partner passes after a huddle, now the obligation is for his partner to be ethical and careful about picking his bid. Is this so bad? I don't know what percentage are actually connection problems or distractions in the home but I suspect that a significant fraction if not a majority of delays are people thinking.

Yes, outside memory aides would change the nature of the game. The only question is whether this would be for the better or for the worse. People are already complaining that there are so many conventions that they can't remember them. Even in my very complicated systems I often choose to make parallel sequences to ease memory work even though I know said sequences are sub-optimal. Systems can only get so complicated before the memory load makes it unprofitable to add anything else. I just think that one avenue of bridge development might be to see what people could do if the memory limitation wasn't there. It might be less enjoyable but it also might be part of the solution to re-energize the game and reverse the trend of diminishing numbers. Your point about card combos is well taken and at first the idea seemed ridiculous but honestly now that I've thought about it, I don't think the nature of the game would be changed that much by allowing card combos to be looked up. That is only a small part of playing the hand. Inferences from the bidding, planning of entries, endplays, squeezes, coups...these make a great card player. If somebody stood up and rattled off the best way to play some suit combination given 1, 2, 3, 4 entries would you think that person was a great card player? Personally, I would keep card play as it is because there is a fundamental difference between that and bidding. In bidding you have to deal with a partner and can't make stuff up on the fly. In card play, you can laboriously compute the best way to play a suit combination in isolation.

Yes. This has been done before but it is only now that the ACBL has said that they have no way to punish people who do this intentionally. I thought my post was dripping with sarcasm but the point of it was not that I invented a way to cheat but that cheating is for now all intents and purposes legal.

I'm sure there are.

If I wanted to memorize stuff I'd go on Jeopardy. To be clear, I am suggesting that we strike the rule you cited from the law books. I don't believe that how well or how much can we memorize says or should say anything about our bridge abilities. I know what the law is. The question is why was the law introduced in the first place? It was certainly written in an era when there weren't many conventions. This is a new era and perhaps it is time to review this law. I'm not sure how much more bridge can develop with this memorization requirement. To me, off-line contemplation of whether convention A or B works better in a given situation is a better indicator of bridge ability. Inventing conventions to suit situations, choosing when to apply a convention...both of these are bridge abilities but memorization to me seems like an appeal to expediency rather to something that must inherently be a part of the game.

I just invented a new convention that can only be played online in ACBL tournaments. I call it RFH for risk-free hesitations. Here's how it works. If you have a constructive hand but are afraid to bid then just sit there for a minute and then pass. If there is no red dot and partner knows you weren't away getting a cup of coffee then he can infer you have a smattering of points over there. When opps complain that your partner bids again with a minimum then just point them to the ACBL ruling that since they can't prove there wasn't a connection problem that no ruling will ever be made on tempo issues online. Here's the important part, if they ask you why you took so long, just say that you had to go to the bathroom. I predict this convention will sweep like wildfire. Assume that everyone plays it but don't admit to having ever heard of it. I'm a genius.

Partner could always keep FD open and track each bid manually if the explanation wasn't shown automatically. The result would be that things would just be slower. There is no way to stop people from consulting notes while playing online and so in my opinion you shouldn't even try. What should bridge be about? Should it be about memorization or should it be about using your brain to figure out the best meanings for bids in each and every possible situation? The requirement to memorize (which isn't a total requirement because you can consult defensive notes for mid-chart+ conventions) is likely one to speed the pace of the game. Having a huge book of notes at the table and trying to leaf through it would be pretty slow. On a computer though, this objection largely goes away.

I think we need to be careful and not be too hard on those who are at least trying to fully disclose their methods by using FD. I think there is this tendency for people to complain if someone's hand does not match exactly what it says in FD. Conversely, people who use no CC or are forced to use the default CC can do all kinds of things that aren't SAYC and then people will get upset if you try to complain about this. Generally, in f2f bridge, if you can provide system notes that document your agreement then those notes are believed. A FD file is the equivalent of system notes and if a bid disagrees with the notes then you should have to prove that they consistently deviate from their agreements before any penalty is imposed. An infrequent deviation is protected by law 40.

I agree. Some people think they don't have to alert if they have an FD explanation. There are explanations in FD even for non-alertable bids so it is still important to alert bids that are alertable. What was unclear to me was something that happens to me occasionally. I will alert a bid whose explanation is provided by FD. An opponent will then click on the bid that I made to ask for an explanation. I tell them to hover the mouse there and look for the FD explanation. Some people will then demand that I re-type the FD explanation into the alert box. I'm not going to do that because it is a waste of time and sometimes impossible because FD explanations can be much larger than what you can fit in the alert description. Also, some people are incredibly lazy about reading alerts even once they know how. It has happened several times where I make some transfer opening (not an ACBL tourney) and the opponent keeps trying to bid my suit naturally. His partner is actually paying attention and interprets all these bids as cue-bids and a disaster ensues. Later the lazy guy will acknowledge he didn't bother to read the provided explanation. This is worth a classic Todd <sigh>.

cute.....the devil made you do it? Oh dear! Quite the opposite! :)

Gweny, A couple of questions. We all know that people need to alert if their bid is alertable whether they are using no-CC, a "standard" CC or a FD CC. Is the format of the presentation of the alert using FD acceptable to the ACBL? Is the issue with the ACBL that if I want to see the opponents system in overview that this is more difficult with FD than with the standard CC? Are there really people that would know how to get a system overview using the old CC style but not the new CC style? Todd

I resolve the same thing I do nearly every year. I hope to exorcise more.

Saddam was right about one thing. The result of the "trial" was a foregone conclusion from the very beginning. Having said that, all dictators deserve death and that he was a dictator is not a matter up for question.

I sometimes play but I only play Chess960. You can play this on ICS.

FD is just not a replacement for the old-style CC. The old-style CC would not automatically show the description of a bid. I wish that Fred and Uday would do two things. First, make some sort of announcement and verify that people have read it before continuing. This announcement would say that FD exists, what it does, how to see explanations, etc. In other words, the basics of how FD operates. Next, when a bid is alerted and FD has an explanation, have the software automatically insert a statement to the effect of "hover your mouse here and you'll see the explanation in the upper right-hand corner." There has been a failure to communicate as people who alert a lot and use FD like I do will tell you that people don't know they need to hover over the bid nor do they know where to look should they do that. This seems like something you could do and internationalize it to do away with the language problem.

Describe to me how or why "invitational or better" is not a "descriptive" bid. One might say that a bid showing any shape and 0+ points would be non-descriptive but as long as the bid describes any point count then isn't that saying something about the hand, therefore, descriptive, therefore not illegal. Note that if the bid means 0+ any shape then all other bids would have to be undefined. If some other bid were defined then the relay bid would simply mean "all hands that don't qualify for this other bid." That in and of itself is a description of your hand so since nobody would ever have such a ridiculous bid defined then I posit that this regulation actually does not ban anything. It will be interpreted to ban whatever they want to ban but reasoning about it with pure logic one can make an argument that it doesn't ban anything that anybody would actually use. So, please ACBL define the word "descriptive" for me.

To whoever is running this, please not my BBO name is DrTodd, not DrTodd13 like I am on the forums. Please repeat the time and I'll try to make it. Todd

To whoever is running this, please not my BBO name is DrTodd, not DrTodd13 like I am on the forums. Please repeat the time and I'll try to make it. Todd

Happy Festivus! Merry Xmas and may Robo-Santa not mow you down in a hail of bullets and rockets.

The software should record how long it took to make each bid and play. I don't see the need to delay fast bids or plays, especially by only 2 seconds. A director pressed for time should be able to mark boards for further study as you suggest and when he reviews those boards he should see the time that each bid or play took. Even in a big tourney, the exact sequence may not come up and even if it does come up it might not come with enough frequency to make an effective poll. Somebody else's suggestion of having a way of asking people of a certain skill level what they would do would be a cool feature. I don't see that much of a difference between online and f2f TDs. Sure, the f2f TDs deal mostly with mechanical problems, lead-out-of-turn, revoke, etc. They still have to deal with BIT, UI, MI as well. Both TDs goal should be to make the tournament run smoothly but also to follow the rules. Sure, we can do anything we like but unless we are following the laws of duplicate bridge I don't think it is fair to call it bridge. Right now, I think one big problem with online TDs is their failure to adequately act as a sponsoring organization. They are in effect mini-sponsoring organizations and therefore have many rights under the laws of bridge. What online TDs tend to do however is to not tell people what the rules are until the situation arises and then they make it up on the fly rather than following the rules of bridge. Sure, they may have the authority to ban a system if they say so prior to the start of play but they can't say anything and then 5 hands in decide that forcing pass shouldn't be allowed. Many online TDs are just woefully ignorant of their responsibilities as a sponsoring organization and of the laws themselves. Perhaps along with each board a TD has under review, a flowchart should be presented to aid in the collection of facts and to guide the ruling. Where flowcharts differ legally between sponsoring organizations you can have multiple flowcharts that are selected at tourney creation time. At the end of the flowchart after questions have been answered perhaps an automatic adjustment can be made. To some degree this would solve the problem of automatically awarding an adjusted score in the absence of any damage.

The problem isn't the bss file format. Any reasonable programmer could write a bss file editor. The problem is that you need the GUI to interface with the bss editor in a way that it currently isn't doing. To make GUI changes you Fred to do it.