DrTodd13

I have that flag set and I still get invitations from enemies to play in tournaments.

You need to know what the rules are and you need to know the quality of the director. If no rules are specified, then the only valid assumption is that the laws of duplicate bridge are in force and that all rights of sponsoring organizations in those rules have been waived. In other words, sponsoring organizations have a right to restrict conventions but if you don't mention anything about restricting them then there are no restrictions. There is no such thing as a "default" prohibition for highly-unusual methods in the basic laws of bridge. All such prohibitions are decisions of sponsoring organizations. Fred and Uday. Is there any way you can create a web page with a director's test specifically tailored for online play and then add a symbol to the profiles of people who pass the test? That way you can see if your tourney host has passed the director's test and it would let aspiring directors know who to contact for questions about how they should have handled a situation.

I ran into a pair playing a 7-8 pt balanced 2N in a tournament. Of course, they were only doing it because people were unprepared to defend against it. If this tactic got popular then defenses would be created and this ridiculous bid would be punished.

You could add a certification process and only those certified would be allowed to compete in certain tournaments. Let every tournament establish their own certification quiz and before you can compete in a tourney by that person, you have to take the quiz and score a certain percentage. I don't even care if they can sit there with the rules while they are taking the quiz, at least this is a way to verify that they've read the rules and are therefore more likely to follow them. To comment on something somebody else said, yes f2f bridge is not the same as online bridge. We need slightly different rules for the different environments. Alerting rules should not be more relaxed online, only different. You can self-alert and both opps can see your explanations. This greatly reduces potential MI problems and is better than screen play where different explanations may be given on different sides of the screen. We have the capability to do better than f2f bridge and I'm not sure that we are.

No....but 3rd seat V vs NV is the same as 1st seat V vs NV. You can't play a different system just because the first two people have passed. :)

If a pair were intentionally using a mixed strategy then I think that pair would be more likely to disclose rather than less likely. You know Zia uses them so when you face Zia it is always in the back of your mind..."what is he up to now?" Wouldn't we all like our opps second guessing us like they do Zia? So, if possible, I would look for ways to disclose to opps that we use mixed strategies. Would doing so be sufficiently strange as to require a pre-alert? Even if it doesn't rise to that level, you could always tells opps you do it anyways. Can't possibly be a penalty for that right?

If the client code is closed-source, then you could use spare cycles on clients to compute how many tricks must be taken at a minimum by each side. Then you could refuse to accept claims that are impossible on the lie of the cards. You could also use this capability to short-circuit the play near the end of many boards where every possible line of play results in N or N-1 tricks. Of course, if the system didn't "auto-claim" for you then you would know that there must be some crucial decision left to be made somewhere that could affect the result.

The one time I played with Fred, we weren't having such good luck so crazy me, Fred opens 2♠ in first seat, pass on my right, I psyche a 2N asking bid with ♠ support and something like 4 or 5 points. If the opps points had been split roughly evenly I might have gotten away with this without getting doubled in the ultimate 3♠ contract. Unfortunately, my LHO had like 20 points and doubled at every opportunity. I think it was equal vul and Fred tried valiantly but couldn't keep it to down 2 so it ended up losing IMPs.

Aren't there only really 8 reasonable possibilities? 4 for vulnerability * 2 for whether you are first seat or second seat? Oh, by the way, another 2♦ possibility is the Purple 2♦ used in the context of Purple Twos. Can't let my little invention die...have to spread the word.

Hand 1: The flatness of the outside suits makes me somewhat fear a psyche here, but if I am going to psyche then, #include <hrothgars_standard_mixed_strategy_rant>. Open 2♦ sometimes, 3♦ sometimes, 1N sometimes, 1♠ sometimes, 1♥ sometimes, pass sometimes. Hand 2: See no reason to psyche here. Want to get to the right spot and just try to right side the contract. Hand 3: Again, mixed strategy. 2♠ sometimes, 2N sometimes, 3N sometimes, 3♥ sometimes, 4♥ sometimes, Pass sometimes.

Did anyone mention Wilkosz? Anyway, I would guess most of the time you aren't in a position of having a finished system but lacking a 2♦ bid. If you are in this situation then I would think it is unlikely that you'll find many of the potential 2♦ meanings as potentially very useful. A system has to be designed in totality. You may engineer your system such that 2♦ handles hand types that are difficult otherwise. Or, you may engineer 2♦ to mutliplex other meanings to free up earlier or later bids. Anyway, my point is that asking "what should I use as my 2♦ bid" is perhaps a bad question.

I think I once ran by a similar issue with some ACBL directors. You sit down to play and your opps card says "Standard American." Four boards in you realize that these people have absolutely no clue what standard american is. They're bypassing 6 card majors, doubles have random meanings, other things that just make you go "huh? THAT is standard american?" I made some inquiries and petitions to try to get such people from being banned from writing "we play standard american." I lobbied to get their CC to say "we are clueless and bid pseudo-randomly." I don't care what your verbal agreements are, if there is something on the CC it takes precedence. If you claim to play something via a regular CC or an FD CC then that is your agreement. If you deviate from that, it is misinformation. These people have to learn somehow and if they are continually let to slide then they'll never learn. Obviously though, my lobbying got nowhere because the consequences would have been too shameful for the people who would be told that they are too clueless to claim to play standard american. We can't enforce the rules because we'd lose too much revenue.

I've written a cool utility to analyze over 2000 Dejeuner hands. When we played 1N natural, non-forcing over 1♠, we never had a case where we passed 1N. That is why we feel ok giving it up. We very often ended up in 2♦. (45)22 is a problem and this is why we'd like to be able to play 2♦. If anyone is interested in our extensive Dejeuner analysis let me know and I'll send you the file. We can then talk about extending this analysis tool to be more generic and possibly useful to a wider range of people. Todd

If the idea is to be able to play 2♦ after the 1N relay then you can't use 2♦ as the relay after a 2♣ response by opener. I might change my mind and make 1♠-1N-2♥ the 4450 hand and then push the existing 2♥+ up one step which is actually more symmetric.

After viewing this thread and some discussion, foobar and I are going to switch to the following and see how it works. It is hard to determine this because 1♠ has such a low frequency but let's see what people think. After 1♠ we have: 1N = relay, invite+ or weak hand with ♦ support 2♣ = single-suited ♦ hand 2♦ = to play 2♥ = shape relay 2♦ = 4♣ 2♥ = 5+♣, high-shortness 2♠ = 5+♣, equal-shortness 2N+ = 5+♣, low-shortness, various shapes 2♣ = 5+♥, F1 2♦ = 5+♠, F1 2♥ = to play, probably 6♥ 2♠ = to play, probably 6♠ 2N = 5/5 majors invite The idea is we don't want to jump to show single-suited ♦ hands because that leaves us poorly placed. We still want to be able to play 2♦ much of the time after a 1♠ opening and we retain that because after that 1N relay, opener's most likely bids are 2♣ or 2♦ (5♦4♣ more common than 5/5 that's why 2♦ is 4♣ instead of 2♥ which would be more symmetric but we give symmetricness up for practicality). After 2♣, 2♦ is to play. If opener responds 2♦ then responder can pass that. If opener shows 5/5 minors then now maybe you know you have a fit in 3♣ but in the worst case you may have to fall back to 3♦. We aren't that sure about the 1♠-2N sequence but it seems like this might be the trouble hand, 5/5 in both majors invite. If in practice some other invitational hand is more troublesome than 5/5 majors then we'll try to work it into 2N.

I think I'm going to try 3N here. Partner knows that I know about the singleton and yet I'm still offering 3N. I must have 4 good ♦ and have already shown 4♥. Give partner the info and let him make the decision.

5332 with diamonds is opened 1N. You can then relay out the shape and discover the 5♦. 4450 is not lost because you open 1♠. It is shown as one of the single-suited shapes, admittedly at a higher level. Our general approach is that relay breaks after 2♣ below game are natural and invitational. So, relayer will show a minimum but opener can't. The problem which some have noticed is that if you bid 2♣ then you're almost sure to hear partner say 2N+ (doubt he has ♠ shortness...probably more likely ♥ or ♣ shortness) and now you're very poorly positioned to bid anything. As someone noted, the solution may be in defining a 2N bid because at this point it is quite pointless. Maybe 2N could indicate an invitational hand with 0-1♦. I was thinking 2♥ might have some merit. Opener will probably take some action with a max.

[hv=v=b&s=saqxhatxxxdckxxxx]133|100|Scoring: IMP[/hv] Partner opens 1♠ in first seat meaning 5+♦, 9-14, and no 4 card major unless 4450. You have the hand as presented and your options are: 1N: to play, non-forcing 2♣: artificial, invitational or better, relay...to which pd will respond: 2♦: with 5+♣ 2♥: with 4♣ 2♠: single-suited hand with ♠ shortness or 3262 or 2362. 2N: single-suited hand with ♥ shortness 3♣: 2263 3♦+: single-suited hand with ♣ shortness 2♦+: to play, non-forcing What is your bid?

Has anybody done an analysis of what the relative proportion between 3M and 4M is for both online and f2f? Maybe it is just me but I believe I've noticed a trend online to always bid game even when it is remotely close and 3M is relegated to a competitive situation where you want to stop in 2M because you know for sure you don't have game and then opps compete forcing you to 3M. If what Luis said is true that he doesn't want to be in the position of defending so many games then wouldn't the natural solution to be to almost always bid game against him? Maybe he shouldn't have said anything. :P

(ii) could have been used to ban almost every new convention ever invented. People can always say they are disadvantage by having it sprung on them and not having time to develop an optimized defense. The answer to (ii) is let people get some terrible scores when people invent something new. Those people will get sick of getting bad scores and will develop defenses and then we are back to the norm. I don't see anything wrong with a temporary advantage for someone who invents something new. Look at how precision kicked butt when it was first introduced before people knew how to cope with it.

What irritates me are "advanced" or better players who make a minimum bid in response to partner's take-out double with 9+ points. Fortunately for them, the take-out doubler usually doesn't know how to respond to a take-out doubler either so they will raise partner's minimum response on almost any hand. I very often see 11 or 12 pt hands making minimum responses and I was told a couple days ago of a case where responder made a minimum bid with 16 points.

One thing foobar and I recently added is that after the control showing bid, one step is the normal start of denial cue-bids for aces and kings. However, a two step starts denial cue-bidding for queens and skips the aces and kings. This would typically be useful where you are only missing 0 or 1 controls and therefore know what control is missing by looking at your hand. This just saves some space and let's you find out more about queens and jacks before you have to make a slam or grand slam decision.

You say you played 5 hands with this lady? Well, let's say the cutoff for a sufficient number of boards to know how good a person is is 50. So, you played 5 hands with her out of a possible 50. Therefore, her opinion would count only 1/10th as much as people who have played 50 hands with you. Moreover, give the opps the ability to rate you as well and you get 2 good ratings and one mediocre one. I think somebody was suggesting that I was suggesting that people look at results in order to rate people. I am suggesting the exact opposite. Results are largely irrelevant. The quality of the field and how lucky you are can both cause a purely "look at results" approach to fail, not to mention what a pure results-based approach does to human psychology. If we just wanted to look at results then we could automate it and not need human input. If the purpose of a rating system is to find people you might like to play with then how other people view you as a partner is all that's important. So, to people that are very passive and like to sit back and not take sacrifices then your style will be unpleasant to them. I admire skepticism and I'm not 100% sure my approach will work but I very much suspect that it is better than what we have now and puts in place several motivations to get people to do the right thing. If people want to rating system to be useful then they'll have to bite the bullet and say, "ok..we played 5 hands and on most of them he was ok and on the other two it wasn't my style so I'll rate him a 4 or 5." If everyone starts handing out 1's and this becomes a problem in that everyone's ratings are tending towards 1 or 2 then a gentle reminder that the system might actually be useful if people tried to do it unemotionally rather than emotionally might be in order. I tend to think that your somewhat regular partners who must like you otherwise they wouldn't keep playing with you will keep your rating somewhere around where it should be because they know you better and their opinions carry more weight due to number of boards played.

It is not possible to distinguish between a new member and an old member from a new location with a new name. Isnt this going to cause an issue with any ratings schemes? Anyone with a bad rating will drop back to newbie status and start over with a new name. A system that makes it easy to avoid these people might make it hard for true newbies to gain their footing. Along with a person's rating, you need to see how many times they've been rated . If they've only been rated once or twice then you shouldn't take the rating too seriously. I think the hassle of telling all your friends your new ID will make few people switch IDs frequently but you're right, if they are determined then you can't stop this behavior but I don't think it will be a big deal. I'm thinking that when you quite playing with (or potentially against) someone that a box would pop up asking if you'd like to rate them. You could right click on their name and change your mind later on but unless you pop the box up I don't know how much participation you'd get in the ratings system. Under my scheme, if you play a small number of hands with someone and then get pissed off and give them a 1, your rating won't have much weight because you didn't play that many hands with them. At normal tables, I don't think the novice has to rate a worldclass is a problem because I don't think such pairings are very commonplace. In tournaments, you may get this mix of people (assuming you rate opps as well as pd) but in that case the number of boards against any opp is small (see argument above) and a user could always refuse to rate someone if they can't differentiate between adv and wc. The prima facie meaning of a rating is as a measure of ability. You admit they are meaningless as a measure so I think that pretty much means they suck. Maybe we should start a poll to see how many thing the self-rating is a self-measure of ability or a statement of desire who they want to play against? I don't see why anyone should choose the latter when that is clearly not its intent. Just because people who self-rate expert tend to share traits does not mean people are self-rating that way because they know they share those traits with other people who self-rate that way.

If we just want to have fun then do away with ratings altogether. If we are going to have a rating then presumably it is going to be used for something. It is going to be used to find partners and opponents with which we hope to maximize our fun. I'll tell you that my personal experience has been that if you really want to partner with or play against experts you'll be hopping from table to table constantly. This isn't my idea of fun. It is just my view that the fun of more accurately selecting who to play with and against would be greater than the hurt feelings caused by people who aren't rated the way they would like.