DrTodd13

I do not believe the laws say that doubler has to pass now. It seems to me that once doubler's RHO passes, the laws say that doubler does not have to pass throughout now. Todd

LAW 35 When after any inadmissible call specified below, the offender's LHO makes a call before a penalty has been assessed, there is no penalty for the inadmissible call and ... the redouble is cancelled and the auction reverts to the player whose turn it is to call and proceeds as though there had been no irregularity. I think it is this law that applies but if LHO had not bid then I think law 36 applies. LAW 36 Any double or redouble not permitted by Law 19 is cancelled. The offender must substitute a legal call and the offender's partner must pass whenever it is his turn to call; the lead penalties of Law 26 may apply. Todd

The director was way way off on this one and should be reported to their sponsoring organization for retraining. On the issue of fielding, this is handled differently in different parts of the world. In some places, fielding except in the most obvious cases is deemed to show an undisclosed partnership understanding. In our jurisdictions, if you suspect someone has psyched and determine (for whatever reason) that it was your partner then you can take whatever action you like to avoid a disaster. If opps' bidding gives you no reason to suspect a psyche from partner and you still field the psyche then there is strong evidence of an undisclosed partnership understanding. When there seems to be 50 or 60 points in the deck and you guess that partner ha psyched then there shouldn't be a sanction for that.

David Stevenson's bridgetalk forum is probably a better forum for laws questions than this one. Here you'll get a bunch of opinions from people but there you get the opinion of the chief director of the English Bridge Union. He can give opinions for multiple countries as well. Anyway, with respect to what Flame said, David Stevenson recently said that directors are now being informed not to just blindly rule for the non-offenders but to use their best judgement and to let an appeals committee deal with it only if the people who don't like the ruling feel strongly enough about it. So, maybe ruling against the non-offenders was standard policy in some places at certain times but it is moving away from that direction. Online where there is no appeals committee directors have to make these calls anyway so they have to be able to do their best in these cases.

Deductive reasoning will always be the primary part of bridge. Even with fancy systems, deduction is still in play at every moment of the game. Some people seem to think that that is all that the game should be about. There is no right or wrong here, only preferences. This debate rages because some want the game to evolve to include systems creation as an important skill and others resent having to learn anything new to enjoy their game. Personally, the big turn off of chess to me is that to be good you have to memorize the opening book. I don't want bridge to turn into a memory contest and so even in no-holds-barred bridge, I would allow defense to consult notes for anything that isn't common. Having to create and maintain such defensive notes would not bother me although most people would hate it. Fortunately, we have a great site like BBO where these two groups can coexist. The systems experimenters can play there and enjoy. If they get the desire to play f2f bridge with their toys then right or wrong I think they'll have to found a new bridge league that promotes their viewpoints. Us systems people are in the minority and I don't think complaining will help us. The incumbents are there to maximize profit which means maximizing people which means that the majority get to do whatever they want. The minority really only has the choice to acquiesce or found a new bridge league. We're so spread out though it is hard to get critical mass of these people.

Hi Ben. There is certainly some cutoff point where if the 1NT bidder has few enough points then your side will make 3N (or some other contract) your way while you may not be able to punish (1N)-X sufficiently to recoop your lost game bonus. So, I'm not sure that because the 1N bidder has less than promised that that can never be an issue that would require an adjustement. Todd

This 1N is not even close to a psyche. It is picking the closest bid that most closely matches this hand where other bids describe it in even worse ways.

If someone springs something on you that you and your partner haven't seen then just bid naturally. That is the equivalent of using your knowledge of chess tactics to defend against a never-before-seen variation being sprung on you. After the round, you and partner can discuss how to better improve your defense the next time around. If there is any place in the world that has a thriving bridge community that has very few bidding restrictions then I don't see how people can make the argument that restrictions are necessary for the health of bridge. AFAIK, there are several countries that have little or not bidding restrictions yet thriving bridge communities. To then say that restrictions are necessary in some other country is to as least partly insult the intelligence of the people in that country. What I'll never understand are those people who take up such an intellectual game as bridge and then start trying to impose restrictions to keep themselves from having to think. There is a constant tension in those countries where systems restrictions are in place between those that have learned the predominant style of bidding and then just want to blissfully play that way until they die and those who view it as an intellectual pursuit and don't shy away from new systems and conventions. For somebody with more time on their hands, it might be interesting to find out the average age of bridge players in various countries and correlate that to the amount of system restrictions. I'll bet that the older the average brdige player the more restrictions.

I just have a problem with sports that are judged. Judging is so prone to error that it is ridiculous to say someone won by 0.0012 of a point. Even refereeing is bad enough but almost every sport has a referee of some kind so you can't get rid of those. So, if you get rid of everything that is judged then you have plenty of room left for bridge. They should also get rid of these events where they just add a person or change a distance or something. Synchronized diving? Synchronized swimming? Rythmic gymnastics? I would think they would want sports that people actually did. Todd

This suggestion is workable. It will require only minute additional resources on the server. Each client can keep track of each person's think time for each hand. At the end of the hand, the client sends the computed think time to the server and this is stored in the record. You could tell if one player in the partnership was slow although you couldn't penalize that person individually, you could issue a warning individually. You could detect situations where one pair are responsible for one slow board and the other pair for a second slow board. Todd

Just not going after overtricks will leave you very close to the par result. It is how much you fall below the par result on a relative basis that matters, not just a binary question of whether you beat par or not. It seems to me that par is much more suited to IMPs than it is to matchpoints. Getting that overtrick is so valuable in MP that a comparison against a par result is not so valuable there. Todd

Bidding in such a way as to make the opening lead difficult is an art and should be encouraged rather than discouraged. Relay systems, that I'm sure you hate and classify as destructive, only reveal one of the hands and if the dummy is the hand that has fully described itself then your approach of choice of opening leads will still be totally worthless since you won't gain any new information. So, basically, my summary to you is, step into the modern era - be aggresive and preemptive and cause as much hell for the opponents as you can. Why play this game if you don't want to think and learn and get better over time? That is just my opinion but I know there are thousands who don't want to get better and to keep playing the same game they learned 30 years ago. We need two bridge leagues. One for people who want to stay stagnate...we'll call it crippled bridge...and another for people who aren't afraid of the new bridge.

Here is my favorite. Don't know if I invented it or not but I called it JELLO. X = 5m4M 2C = forces 2D then: Pass = I want to play 2D 2H = H+minor 2S = S+minor 2D = majors 2H = hearts 2S = spades

Aisha, Sounds like you have the world's worst virus on your computer. The name of this virus is "windows." Good luck with all that. Todd

Hot off the presses. If LHO is constrained to have exactly 4 diamonds but not have 4+ spades, 4+ hearts, or 5+ clubs then RHO has the CQ approximately 33.11% of the time. If LHO has the majority of the outstanding points for defense he may not choose to lead from a 4+ card major in which his holding is subject to giving a trick away if it is led. Of course, leading from Qxxx of diamonds is similarly likely to give away a trick but maybe he has something in every suit and has to underlead something. In any case, I doubt those cases where a major isn't led in favor of diamonds would account for more than 17% so the CQ is more likely to be with LHO assuming he is rational. Todd

EricK is probably right in his analysis. I did the simulation under the assumption that LHO has exactly 4 diamonds but generated the rest of his hand randomly. Under this assumption, the CQ is likely to be with east approximately 58.2569% of the time. I'll modify the simulation to deny west a 4 card major and clubs longer than diamonds and see what happens. Todd

I think there is new information. West must have a 4 card suit but you don't know what it is. Once you see the lead you know. Moreover, you know that he is less likely to have clubs. However, I don't totally trust myself on these complicated probability questions so I can write a simulation of this scenario if you are interested. Free...are you sure you're not a reincarnated Barry Crane? Maybe his rules made some sense with human shuffled cards but we need to abandon those rules for computer shuffled hands. Todd

There has to be some commonality shared amongst players or one would never make any progress bidding. The fact that experts adjust what they feel a hand is worth based on shape, honor concentration or location should be common knowledge. If it isn't then the problem is that these people have never heard of anyone exercising bidding judgement. Common procedures are never alerted or explained and upgrades/downgrades are in this class of common procedures.

Matchpoints tourney. Pass - pass to me. I have a 4333 15 count that I don't particularly like so I decide to treat it as a 14 count. Pd and I play 12-14 NT's non-vul so I open 1N and explain as 12-14. We play the hand during which opponents hand me a couple tricks. Then after the hand is over, the opponents count my hand and discover I had 15. Then they accuse me of saying that I had 10-12. I point them to the bidding box review which is still there and shows the alert of 12-14. Then they accuse me of cheating for not telling them I had 15 when our agreement is 12-14. Yet another example of woeful ignorance of the laws and an attempt to gain through litigation what they gave up at the table. They call the director and you always wonder what director is going to rule, based on some of the ridiculous rulings we've seen documented on this site. Fortunately, the director (trtttt) got this one right. Good job. Todd

Reminding tourney players that people can't respond when they send them messages would be fine. However, I suggested this in another forum and I'll suggest it again now. When a table has finished a round, the people at that table should be able to private chat to anyone, including their partner. Another (more difficult) suggestion would be to queue up private messages from players not in a tourney to those players in the tourney until their current round has completed and to then deliver them to those participants. Todd

I'd like to have the ability for kibitzers to talk to players in a tournament privately so long as the player is done for the round. Todd

Any idea when season two is starting and are there any experts interested in forming a new team? Todd

In my oppinion irdoz made that point clear in some post before, and I am very astonished that you still believe your idea is a good one. I shall explain again why it is inefficient and impractical, maybe this will help. You are proposing that a tournament director should post his decisions to a forum where they are reviewed by some authority that gives feedback if deemed necessary. This implies that all decisions should be posted, because if the director selects among the decisions he has made, he probably omits one that is clear to himself but still wrong. Now imagine a 12-board tourney with 40 tables/director, and asume that a director makes 10 decisions there, which sounds rather few. Each should be documented with a hand diagram, the bidding, the relevant chat log, all with names changed. And of couse there should be given some reason for the decision. This can be even non-trivial for an adjustment of an unfinished board, if you adjust to a non-artificial score though there are more than one possible results, but you think the one you adjusted to is the most likely one. My rough estimation is that this takes 15 minutes per decision, so that you are busy for total 2.5 hours after a tourney that lasted 1.5 hours if all went well. I call this inefficient! And because it is inefficient, you will hardly find a director who would be willing to do it, therefore it is impractical. Karl Couldn't most of this information be collected automatically by the software with only the explanation left to be typed by the director? The software could help quite a bit here. It could keep track of bidding delays for use in UI decisions. The software could also reject claims that are bad (such as claiming all the tricks when no possible line of play would yield that result or claiming 0 tricks when some greater number of tricks must be won).

I remember vividly a hand I played against a precision pair where the auction went something like (1♥)-p-(p)-? and I balanced in. I got the smack-down layed on me because my RHO had a good 8 count and LHO also had a max. RHO passed because the hand looked like a misfit (it was) and there was no way he could play his suit at the 2 level. After this, I saw the wisdom in playing this way. The only reason a bid is forced with 6 points in SAYC is that opener could have 19+. If I don't have game and can't improve the contract then why bid?

A useful metric for rating tourney hosts may be complaints per tables served. A flat number doesn't mean much unless you know how many tables have been served. 10 complaints out of 1,000,000 tables served would be good. We just need a way to keep track of table served and to limit the number of complaints to one person per tourney. You can always leave a comment if you think the director got more than one ruling wrong for you in the tourney. Tourney hosts need to recognize that some people in their tourneys are in fact experts on the law and they could learn from them.