DrTodd13

What is our goal in this discussion? Perhaps a reasonable goal is to minimize human suffering. If we are causing GW and do nothing and the worst projections happen then sea levels rise, people's houses are flooded, arrable zones shift perhaps decreasing world food production, deserts expand, etc. However, if you cut CO2 emissions by enough to make a difference then you would do serious damage to the world economy and a worldwide depression is not very good for human suffering either. To me, the latter is more of a given than the former. Before I do something that I know is going to result in suffering, I want to be damned sure that the suffering I know will happen will be less than the suffering that would happen if we do nothing. To me, I would require "beyond a reasonable doubt" sort of proof before I would accept restrictions. I don't believe that level of proof is out there when the issue still being debated by climatologists. Personally, I'd try to put fusion power on the fast-path and make sure we can switch to a fusion and fuel-cell economy before we run out of oil. This kind of economy is basically a zero-emission economy. If we know we are going to transfer to this kind of economy in 50 years then we need to ask how much damage would we do to the climate in the meantime if GW were real. The projections I keep seeing are "over the next century temperatures will increase..." All these projections assume we'll keep belching the same emissions that we are now and to an even greater degree.

I'm forming a BBO league team. If you are expert+ and interested in being on my team, please send me a message. Maybe others can use this thread for find players to form their own teams. Time is short. Only 3 days left so respond quickly. thanks, Todd

David_c was eloquent in his posts here. Certainly, all this information is greatly filtered by the time it gets to us. The worst filter is the media who have an agenda that they want to push. They could have entitled the article "scientists debate the cause and degree of global warming" but instead they chose to say "the sky is falling." This is the level at which most people stop getting their news. They've heard news story after news story saying it is true so they believe it. They are told of this so-called consensus and so don't investigate it. Really, the masses are the people driving the political process and they have no right to be doing say because they are essentially ignorant. A few of us here may take the time to skim the literature to get a better informed opinion. Those of us with scientific training may spot methodologies and interpretations of statistics that are invalid. There may be things for which a mathematician isn't qualified to speak about in climatology. So, really, you'd need years and years of training in climatology to have a really informed opinion. Personally, I really hate democracy so the idea that we define truth by taking a vote amongst experts is abhorent. Whatever the truth may be, there are a whole range of valid questions that either no one is asking or are asking but aren't getting any press. Most people have their heads in the sand about the issue of running out of oil. Will new fuel technologies be available in time? Given that oil will run out probably by 2050, will we do irreperable harm to the earth during that time period if you believe CO2 is the main problem?

The concepts of borders and countries are fundamentally antithetical to human freedom. If you couldn't cross the border between California and Oregon to seek employment you'd be pissed off but many people who would feel that way would think it was ok to call something a "national" border and then restrict movement across it. There is no fundamental difference between state borders and national borders except that there is an organized crime unit known as the US government that dominates everyone within the "national borders." People are fearful of labor competition and are more racially and culturally biased than they'd like to admit. One just instinct that people have is that people come here and some of them start living off social services rather than earning their own way. If you want to come and work, we should have totally open borders.

In a local club, a director may come to know certain pairs' proclivities. On BBO, this is impossible. It would be nice if a director (or opps for that matter) could easily do a search for all hands played by this pair that matches the auction in question. If the number of resulting hands is very small then it is likely this is a new partnership that don't have solid agreements. If the number of hands is relatively large then you can see whether they frequently deviated from the stated agreement. This isn't perfect because a pair's methods may change over time and the meaning or range of a bid may change but it is better than what we have now where directors are assuming there is an implicit agreement whenever a bid deviates. Guilty unless you can prove otherwise and it is impossible to prove it in the short amount of time a director takes to make a ruling.

I'm new here. Do you mean to say that on BBO, a TD can ignore the Laws of Duplicate Contract Bridge? They do it all the time...most of the time through ignorance.

On BBO, at IMPs, I've come to the conclusion that the only reason to make a penalty double is if you have a surprising number of trumps. So, in game if you have either 4 very good trumps or 5 reasonable trumps (or AK of trump suit when they are in 6). You simply cannot trust the opps bidding enough to figure out the contract is going down otherwise. I've been burned too many times by opps bidding to the 5 level after both of them have made passable bids only to find that they didn't know how to bid and 5 is making +1. At MPs, it is still dangerous because you don't know what opps bidding means but you should be slightly more aggresive.

It is a myth that neutron bombs don't destroy buildings. Neutron bombs are atomic bombs that have been designed to maximize release of neutrons but they are still atomic bombs and do generate typical atomic bomb damage...just a little bit less than atomic bombs designed to maximize shockwave damage.

Personally, I find precision to be a natural system...in most cases more natural than SAYC. As such, why ask about two natural systems in a forum called "non-natural system discussion?"

I think GW would play a system called Bludgeon.

Yet another GW article. I'm not going out and looking for these. They just seem to be appearing on drudgereport and slashdot a lot recently. There was some discussion of cloud cover and this is what the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT has to say. "When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2." This is the sort of non-intuitive result that you wouldn't know unless you had done the research. This seems to be part of the atmosphere's checks and balances that prevents either run-away heating or cooling.

Also there is JELLO: (Woolsey) X = 4 major, 5 minor 2♣ = puppet to 2♦, either to play or major/minor two-suiter 2♦ = both majors 2♥ = 6♥ 2♠ = 6♠

When playing weak NTs, I like to play something that I was told are called "Hyashi runouts." P = forces XX, to play or if responder bids again it shows non-touching suits XX = forces 2♣. all single-suiters starts this way 2♣-2♥ = touching suits

1. There is no doubt burning fossil fuels puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. 2. There must be some system of checks and balances that within some tolerance prevents either run-away cooling or run-away heating. If the Earth did not have such a system then previous cool or warm periods would have resulted in run-away cooling or heating. Once you go past the point-of-no-return you may get run-away heating like on Venus but the Earth must have some system where temperature can vary within some range without creating a run-away effect. 3. Sure, all the people on the coasts think global warming is bad because a lot of their property will be flooded. Nevertheless, species will adapt to new climates. Things will thrive where it was too cold to thrive before. I see no reason to believe that the average temperate of 100 years ago is the ideal temperature for earth. I think the concept of an ideal temperate is an extremely difficult one and think that people who want to believe that we just happen to live at a time where the temperature is "ideal" are not very good at probabilities. 4. A recent study I saw said that we just passed the point in December where we have extracted half of the oil that we are ever going to extract from the earth. How long will it take us to use the remaining half of the oil at current rates? Probably a lot less time than it took to use the first 1/2 when consumption was lower. So, what do we have left? 30 years? 40 years? We are already making progress with fusion reactors which can generate power to be used for electrolysis and then have everything based on fuel cells. Given my view that the transition to hydrogen-based fuel and energy sources are inevitable and not that far off, I see less of a need to worry about temp. increases over the next 40 years.

Another GW story.

This graph says nothing about causation. The people that are skeptical are not saying this graph isn't accurate. They are just saying that they don't believe it to be conclusively proven that humans are the cause of the warming. About 1/2 of the warming occurred before there was a car in every driveway. Anybody know what percentage of total CO2 emissions are from cars? Anyway, like that article I just posted, it is evidently not unanimous in climatology circles either or we wouldn't still be seeing papers like this one. I always hear things like "we have accounted for every possible natural cause of warming and the only thing left is human-caused warming" from the majority. Then other people who are experts in solar radiation come along and say that the majority have not adequately accounted for the primary cause of earth's temperature.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/56456.stm

I find that how opponents react to our system is a function of day and a function of their attitude. Some people decide they need to react to weirdness with their own weirdness and these people get themselves into trouble. People who don't freak out and have the attitude that they are going to bid as normally as possible often do quite well. I see tons and tons of crazy bidding even against normal systems. I think it is more a function of the particular opponents you get than our system. Sigi is right. Directors should announce system limitations based on things like WBF color codes or ACBL GCC, midchart, superchart, etc. Many directors don't seem to know that in the absence of any statement on their part that their are no system restrictions. They need to know what systems people are out there playing so that they know what they want to allow or disallow.

Yes. Thanks for the analysis Ben. It makes me want to get BridgeBrowser so that I can verify all of our ranges. Also, I'd like to see the ratings system that they have implemented. Does it only compute ratings for the sets of deals you have bought or does it give you up-to-date ratings for everyone for all the deals they know about?

Of course on that last one I discounted the singleton ♣J so it was really more like a 9 pt hand.

I think the problem is that you are calling these things psyches. If it is a situation ripe for "psyching" then the psyche would happen frequently enough that what you have is an agreement and not a psyche. In Dejeuner, we alert situations similar to the one you mention to inform opps that it is occasionally a tactical bid. I think what you have is a lot of people with undisclosed agreements. Everybody may get burned by a psyche in a system they don't know but ints or advs will get burned by well-known "psyches" even in standard systems. The problem is that people can't reveal their true agreements because most dual-meaning bids are banned by ACBL. That is why they ban psyching certain things is that it is easier to ban it outright than try to catch people "psyching" too frequently.

We always pre-alert the scheme we use to count points. There is nothing in the rules that says you have to use 4321 or that your alerts must be made using that methodology. Hypothetically, if we did try to do what you suggest then the range would appear larger and would substantially overlap with other ranges. Our 2♦ might be 4.5-11.5 and our 1♣ might be 8-16.5 and our pass 12+. Anybody paying attention will then ask how do we know what to open when where this in an overlap in the ranges at which point we have to reveal our true point count scheme anyway after which there is very little overlap in ranges. Then those people will be pissed that we didn't tell them our real strategy up front. Show me the law that says my explanations must be "easily understandable." I want them to be as understandable as possible but still be accurate. I have an obligation to full disclosure and I don't believe that hiding the way we evaluate our hands is in the spirit of full disclosure. My view is that many experts are effectively not using 4321 but are not effectively disclosing what they are using. This results in this "good 14" and "bad 18" stuff. In our methods, the hand in question was worth 2.5 points. Is this a gross misstatement or a simple deviation? If you want to call it a psyche then I'll counter with we don't have an implicit agreement to psyche this frequently so there shouldn't be a penalty. If you want to call it a deviation then do we have an agreement to deviate like this frequently. I think the answer is no. If we had a huge long history for this bid then how do we calculate what lower range we should announce? Drop the lower X% of instances and chalk those up to infrequent deviations and then list the next amount as the minimum? If that minimum in our scheme is 4.25, 4.5 or 4.75 then what should our alert say? Should it use the fraction? Should you round down? Round up? Are you going to penalize if somebody makes one of these decisions and you believe they should have made the other? Do we really want to go around penalizing people if they are making a valiant effort at full disclosure and hand analysis reveals their true minimum or maximum is off by a point?

Did you use BUMRAP counting or standard counting? Another problem is that even using BUMRAP counting we may have sufficient points to open 1♣ or 1♦ but lack sufficient controls (2) and therefore must treat the hand as weaker. This is another one of those things that was impossible to explain in the alert window before because the size of the alert explanation was limited. Is there a limit on the size of the FD explanation? In any case, this is the type of thing that we have tried to alert in the past and have been told we are giving too much information and it is confusing people. Another example of this is that our intermediate openings have a lower requirement of 9 but BUMRAP counting can give you values in increments of 0.25. We use to alert things using the fractions but several people including one of the posters in this thread suggested dropping the fractions and rounding down. So, 5-8 would actually mean 5-8.75.

Look, I didn't know that this thread would turn into what it has or I wouldn't have been so sloppy with my original post. In subsequent posts I've tried to clarify that this was a deviation from our system. The whole point of the singleton comment was to indicate that it was "close" to the 5-8...meaning it was a deviation and not a psyche. My explanation was probably crappy. I didn't define it was "Wilkosz" at the table but gave the same explanation I did here. If people want to be pedantic that Wilkosz must be 5-5 then fine, we don't play Wilkosz. I'm uninterested in what the name of what we are actually playing is because you aren't supposed to use names to alert things. There are lots of people bitching about these methods being allowed but Sigi and others are correct, no statement to the contrary and the WBF _LAWS_ are in force and the sponsoring organization's _REGULATIONS_ are in force. The sponsoring organization is in effect the tournament host and if they don't specify their regulations then there aren't any. It is a sponsoring organization regulation that requires people to provide defenses to unusual systems/conventions. We don't feel it mandatory for us to provide such defenses or even to allow people to discuss them once the hand starts. However, we don't want unfamiliarity to generate ridiculous results. We want the inherent difficulty of the bid to generate IMPs but not unfamiliarity. As such, we encourage people to discuss when the bid comes up even if they to some degree tailor their defense to the hand they currently hold (if it comes up again then they are stuck with their original defense). We even tell them that we can provide a suggested defense if they want it.

We go out of our way to try to explain our agreements accurately but people are never happy. We have tried adding lots of text to the explanations and people complain there is too much detail. We remove stuff and then people complain that we didn't tell them something. We still have a right to exercise judgement even though our point count scheme differs. Experts upgrade or downgrade hands when they see fit, take more aggresive action non-vul versus vul, get more aggresive in third seat. They don't alert any of these things. It is common knowledge. We don't give up the right to exercise judgement because our point count scheme or system is different. Our 2♦ only guarantess 5-4 so I don't have to have a singleton. Whatever, I admit it was light according to our methods but we don't regularly open 2♦ this light even at this vul. It was certainly a deviation but to call it a psyche would be wrong. You can't know whether we have a pdship agreement to bid like this unless you have a history of our bidding. There isn't a huge amount of history for first seat non-vul vs vul 2♦ bids but about our only agreement is that we vary aggresiveness based on vulnerability. This is another one of those common knowledge things. If everyone thinks it is the right thing to do, then we can change all of our alerts to use different point counts for every possible different vulnerability but if we do it then everybody else should have to do it as well. I personally think this is asking too much and in many cases hypocritical.