DrTodd13

We all know that self-ratings suck. We also know that if you do ratings based on computer-calculated bridge results then people become nasty and the impetus to cheat increases. Therefore, to me it is pretty clear...if you want any form of a ratings system then it should be one where you rate others. This human factor allows people to factor out results over which the player essentially had no control and to differentiate between who is the better player in a particular partnership. Under this system, if you were nasty then your amiability rating would go down. The amiability ratings provides incentive to be nice. Opps can review hands and if you take a weird line of play that happens to work that the opps know isn't the best line then they won't give you as high an ability rating. This is something a system based purely on results could never do. So, maybe this approach is the least of all evils...one evil including not having a ratings system at all. Lots of sites provide them and people are always trying to invent better ones. They are useful but you need just to find a way to provide as much benefit as possible without the negatives.

I agree with Winston. I guess partner has passed initially waiting to see how strong RHO is. Now that he knows he doesn't have a rock crusher, he's willing to risk showing his two-suited hand. He doesn't have clubs because he didn't double so he must have spades and diamonds. So, I'll bid 4D.

1. No online ratings scheme should use anything based on tournament attendance. 2. Any good online ratings scheme should have the ability for the rating to go up and down over time just as a consequence of playing online. Something like "you're an expert if you've won such and such kind of a tournament event" is no good because people get senile and lose ability over time. 3. Initially, rating people on a 1 to 10 scale would be tough. What is a 7? Converging on a number for each player and converging on a community understanding of what a 7 is is an iterative process and in the beginning will be subject to a lot of variance. It is the kind of system where the community will evolve to understand roughly what each value means.

For a while, the ACBL tried SAYC-only events and I would guess that they thought people might like them because of grumbling about how complex systems were getting. So, at that time you have regular events and SAYC-only events. If now you introduced "everything goes" events, you have another stratification of regular events and "anything goes." Now, take a bunch of smart people who take some pride in their intelligence and took up the game in part because of its richness and give them a choice...a more restrictive event or a less restrictive event. I think in part their pride will prevent them from playing in the more restrictive event because that is tantamount to admitting that they are incapable of dealing with complexity. So, I would predict something very odd would happen. The anything goes events would be very popular but at the same time the grumbling over how complex things are getting would only increase even though people have the choice not to have to deal with it.

As a FP player, I'll tell you I play it for several reasons. It isn't boring. Playing the same system over and over may entertain some people but for me part of the enjoyment is playing different systems. Another reason is that I like the ability to quickly reach a good part score but also have accuracy in slam bidding. Sure, we have less accuracy in some situations but normal systems have less accuracy in many other situations so on balance I think it is a win. I certainly do not play FP because I think people will not know how to bid against it and get crappy scores. If that were my goal then I'd be playing any number of odd systems that are legal but still unfamiliar with opponents. Why are some systems banned and other not? There really is no rationale to it other than politics and constituencies. Many people just want to improve to a point where they can enjoy the game and then they stagnate and never try to get better. They just want to play and enjoy themselves and forcing them to learn how to defend against something different than what they are used to makes them not enjoy the game. If I were running any for-profit bridge league, I would be making the same decisions the ACBL is. If they allow FP then old people won't enjoy it any more and many might leave. They don't lose hardly any revenue by banning FP. I think the vast majority of people don't have any philosophical opinion about how much weight should be given to various parts of bridge. Is card play more important than bidding? I don't think they care. They just want to have fun and FP isn't fun for them because it takes them out of their comfort zone. People at the world class level may have an opinion on this matter and they may favor card play and inference rather than bidding because it makes their life easier if bidding complexity is minimized. Still others may enjoy bidding theory most of all. Who is right? There really is no right or wrong, just preferences. In the end, those with the power derived from the majority will dictate what happens. The laws of duplicate bridge may remain agnostic but the conditions of contest will continue down their present path of emphasizing card play instead of bidding. What will the people who like bidding theory do? They'll form enclaves in real life or online and play their weird systems. They may still play in their local bridge organization but just not as much as they would otherwise. They will maintain the opinion that what most people play is "not really bridge" because of the artificial restrictions on system. This is true for almost all the major worldwide bridge events as well. Other people will continue to claim that HUMs are not bridge and should rightly be banned. It is just a matter of opinion and in the end the majority will win.

Just starting alerting all your bids and say "frequently tactical." Alerting that you psyche frequently doesn't make sense because if you are alerting it then it is part of your agreement and therefore, by definition, cannot be a psyche. So, I prefer the term tactical. Of course, the problem is that almost all jurisdictions disallow bids of the form "normal or very weak and tactical." Todd

I think he is referring slyly to ebay's peer-submitted ratings? Dan I've actually implemented a peer-review system for bridge, like Dan says ala EBay. The system weights recent reviews more highly than older reviews...I'm currently using a pretty complicated piecewise function to do this but the concept is simple. Likewise, the system weights reviews more heavily depending on the number of boards played with the person but only up to some limit. The idea is that you can't make a very good judgement about another person after 3 hands but your opinion of them will likely become more accurate up to some threshold. After that, your opinion can't get that much more accurate. Currently I'm using a linearly increasing weight up to 20 boards and beyond that the weight doesn't increase but I'm currently working on trying to figure out whether 20 is the right number or not...doesn't have to be perfect, just close. The system would also indicate how many reviews each person had so you can see whether their early peer-rating might be influenced by a lack of reviews. I think this system allows the rating to adapt over time as previous reviews will age and count less and less. It also prevents a small handful of steady partners from arbitrarily increasing or decreasing your rating by limiting their influence by the fact that their opinion counts as much as someone who has played only 20 boards with you. The obvious approach would have been to weight their judgement based on total number of boards without any sort of cutoff but that enables the sort of abuses discussed elsewhere in this thread. If the purpose of these ratings is to allow others to decide who to play with, then in a sense, only the opinions of pickup parnters should matter. Your regular partners will continue to play with you if they like you and they'll stop if they don't so the only issue is whether the first 10 or 20 boards with a new partner are likely to be enjoyable. Also, my idea was to have separate ratings for bridge ability and amiability. You may have a great player who is a jerk or vice versa. The same system would be used for amiability. After each session with a player, you get a chance to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 on ability and amiability. The ratings effect of vicious people who leave a table after a short number of hands with a pick-up partnership will be minimized by the fact that the weight of their rating will be low due to the fact that they haven't played many hands with the person. If you've played a lot of hands with the person then presumably you like them and in this case you'll probably see them more favorably than others might. So, I think these two characteristics may cancel each other out and give you something close to an accurate rating. Todd

When I said undervalued aces, I meant that most people look at this hand and think 2 aces = 8 points. In a major suit trump game, I think the two aces are worth 9 and the singleton worth around 3. So, with 12 points opposite 13 I'm going to game. I still think the aces are worth 9 in NT but no value for the singleton and I devalue the whole hand due to a likely misfit and that is why I don't even invite in NT. On the odd occasion, we'll play a 4-2 diamond fit here but then the singleton club ace still has some extra value then. Todd

Wow. I'm really in the minority but here is my whacky view. I will bid 2♣ and then raise any 2M to 4M. Oddly, I believe I will also pass a 2♦ response with this hand though as my hand only has game values in a major. Two undervalued aces and lots of ruffing potential tell me to just bid the game here. Todd

We have to first say what the purpose of the rating is before we should say what type of rating is good or bad. Ratings may exist for several different reasons: 1) a way of tracking your progress, 2) a way of identifying potential partners and 3) a way of selecting teammates, opponents, or people to watch. In the first category, you may care about random partnership performance, established partnership performance, or both. In the second category, a partnership rating is useless and you really just want to see how they did with random people. Two people could both have the same delusional view of bidding and work well together and could play terribly with everyone else. In the third category, you may again care about both random and established partnerships depending on whether the potential pair in question are random or established. So, I don't think it is possible to say whether individual or partnership ratings are "better." They are different and each have their own uses. In my view, the problems with ratings systems are the extent to which people will lie, cheat and steal to increase their rating. I believe I have a solution for this problem and I'm willing to sell the answer to the highest bidder.

Counting is boring and at first exhausting. Like almost everything though, if you do it enough times then the brain will build up pathways devoted to that task and it will gradually require less and less energy to do it. Once those pathways are there, even your "I'm lazy now and don't want to count" bridge will be better because you will have developed better instinct. We all know to lose weight you must eat less and exercise more and we all know to play better we must count more but small immediate gain often trumps large long-term gain in our culture which is the apotheosis of anti-patience.

You see. The school day is so short and they can't afford to waste one minute playing bridge when they could be endoctrinating children to love the state, obey authority, accept moral relativism, and always use condoms. There are some fascinating quotes by the originators of the US public school system how the purpose of education is to turn 95% of people into mindless happy drones that don't mind doing the same repetitive task over and over. The other 5% will be their liberally educated masters.

I posted the system on request. I haven't really played it. Todd

I always use snapdragon when partner knows it. I've never missed the penalty double. It might even be more correct to call the alternative a lead-director because have you ever heard of this penalty double being passed out and it resulting in a good score for the doubler? It partner passes the first time but backs in with a double after responder rebids his suit then that would be penalty and would be more reasonable since it isn't at the 1-level.

Fred, I'm saying the CC is useful for things like blackwood. I was not saying the a CC is better than FD for handling the automation of low-level bidding. My point was that if you are going to require someone to ask what 4N means and they say blackwood that perhaps a CC is a better way to find out the variety of blackwood. I'm just saying that FD is not a panacea that solves every problem and covers every situation. There may still be a need to some classic CC sections to handle other aspects of bidding/play. Todd

The problem is inherently massive. Any attempt to dumb it down will yield incorrect results. When is 4N quantitative, when is it both minors, when is it RKCB? Unless you specify the sequences and define the meaning in each sequence then you'll get wrong answers. If you are going to ask the user which one it is then what is the point of FD? If you tell people that they have to specify each sequence then they won't do it because it is too much effort. Pick your poison. Perhaps the right answer is something called a convention card. Todd

What do you want east to bid at his second turn? 2♦ is not a strange call at all.

Better late than never. Happy birthday buddy!

Foobar and I wanted to try combine leads and we started playing what we thought were combine leads but it turned out what we did wasn't combine leads but does seem to be exactly the same modification to it that Fantoni-Nunes uses! My partner and I haven't discussed switching back so we are pretty happy with them.

Wrong. In many jurisdictions there are aspects of property law that do give certain people the right to use or take property belonging to other parties. Concepts such as "squatters' rights" come to mind. You could also examine the process by which entire continents have been taken from indigenous peoples for European settlement. Wrong. He would be in serious breach of anti-discrimination and human rights laws in many jurisdictions in which BBO operates. See...this is a perfect example of how brainwashed people are. Government does not give rights and take rights away. Just because something is enshrined in "law" does not make it right. All that means is that a bunch of people have agreed to it. Given people's tendencies it is no wonder the vast majority of laws actually violate people's right. On the matter of anti-discrimation laws, I never said Fred wouldn't be breaking any laws. I'm only claiming that it is your right to serve or not serve anyone you wish given the right to free association. To the degree that the government forces people to employ or serve those whom they would rather not, the government is violates the rights of those owners. You only believe in freedom if you believe in the freedom for people to be miserable asses. If you won't grant people this freedom then you're nothing more than a bully who wants to force others to live as they see fit.

The Internet is actually an almost entirely private institution. Your ISP should be able to dictate whatever terms they like for you to use their service. BBO is an entirely private organization and as such should be able to set all of its own rules. Membership on BBO is a privilege granted by Fred, not a "right." You never have a "right" to use or take anything belonging to someone else. Personally, I think the vast majority of people have deluded themselves into believing that they believe this to be true. It is true but people don't understand the ramifications of this believe and they aren't willing to change their positions so that their personal philosophy is consistent. If you really believe in freedom and property then you have to believe that people have a right to do things that you don't like so long as they don't hurt anyone else. Fred would be within his rights if he banned the French or women from BBO. He would be an ass if he did such a thing but he still has the right to do it. The rest of us have a right to express our agreement/disagreement by either continuing to use BBO or not. I've made a pretty long journey from defacto Democrat, to Republican, to Libertarian to Anarcho-Capitalist driven by belief that it is wrong to initiate the use of force against anyone. Many people will say they believe that but one consequence of this belief is that all taxes are immoral because they ultimately derive from using guns to force people to pay if they refuse. <rant temporarily off my chest> My point is that some of us believe in private property so of course we'll say Fred can do whatever he wants. Others believe ultimately that individuals have no rights and that "the good of society" is the ultimate goal and those people will use force to prevent a minority from offending a majority.

IMO, "controlled psyches" do not exist. A psyche by definition deviates from partnership agreement. If you have an agreement that a certain bid X in a certain sequence is either one hand or another very weak hand type and you have a mechanism by which responder can determine which one you have then what you have is a convention, not a controlled psyche. If you don't tell the opponents that you with any regularity possess the very weak hand type then you are guilty of failure to alert/misinformation and not guilty of using a controlled psyche. There are numerous bidding scenarios where one hand simply answers questions and the other hand determines when to stop and where to place the contract. In these scenarios, the hand that asks the questions can pretty much "psyche" at will. Such psyches are becoming so prolific in one system that I play that I'm wondering what the proper form to disclose them is. Do I pre-alert and say "we frequently hold weak hands when we make invitational+ relay initiating bids" and/or do I say "invitation+ or tactical weak hand" everytime I make such a bid?

Yeah. Happy birthday buddy!

Random lead: mixing your cards and then leading the one that ends up on top. Random bid: close your eyes, spin around, keep jabbing with your finger until you hit the bidding box, open your eyes, if what your finger is on is a valid bid then make it, if not then repeat process until you do poke a valid bid. We should really differentiate between a probabilistic bid and a random bid. If on a hand with 0 points, I pass 50% of the time over a strong 1♣ and I bid 1N 50% of the time then neither of these bids are random. The problem is...how many such choices can I make until it becomes random? What about 4 bids each with 25% probability? What about 10 bids each with 10% probability? Nobody always bids 1♠ or 1N over a strong 1♣. The other bids always have some meaning so what the overcalls are are really catch-all bids for which no SO should have the right to tell you which call should be your catch-all.

Yes, yes. Have a great birthday Roland.