DrTodd13

Right, when someone does the same psyche so much, it becomes a convention and not a psyche. Of course, in the ACBL, they had to ban "controlled psyches" because they banned the underlying convention.

If my partner psyches and I can use logic to determine that someone at the table has psyched and I determine it is most likely to be my partner then I see nothing wrong with "fielding" the psyche. There are a common set of circumstances in which experts are more likely to psyche. It is not necessary to alert something that should be a part of everyone's bridge knowledge. For example, 1H-(x)-1S. 1S is so often psyched that it should not be necessary to alert it. If you play some unusual convention where psyches can occur in an unexpected spot then you should alert that but alerting common psyche situations is just ridiculous. I also disagree with restricting psyches of conventional bids. Also, not only would I not play in a tournament where psyches were banned but I think such tournaments should not even be allowed. We must be governed by the world-wide laws of bridge and I see no authority there for banning psyches.

DrTodd here, a.k.a. Todd A. Anderson. I was born and lived in West Virginia unless I was 22 at which point I moved to Lexington Kentucky to attend grad school. After being there a year or two I was invited to a party of a fellow schoolmate and some people there were playing bridge and that is where I caught the bug. About 3 year later, myself and two of the other people at that party (and another fellow) won the OKB collegiate tourney. In 1999, I graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science and moved to Oregon to work for Intel. My best bridge moment so far was at the NABC in Toronto. The event for which I'd came was over and so myself and 3 people that I'd played with online (one was my pd from the collegiate tourney) decided to play the Swiss on Sunday. We alternated partnerships so everyone would get a chance to play with everyone else and we weren't doing so well after the first 3 rounds....probably about 30% of the field. This round my old partner and I were getting ready to play and were waiting for our opponent's partner to show up. I was sitting facing the door and most tables had started play and so the foot traffic was low in and out of the doors when I saw Bob Hamman come walking in. He headed right for our table and sat down and so my pd and I knew we were in for a treat. We would learn later that the guy who was already at the table was a client and that he had hired Hamman and at the other table had hired Petra Hamman and Joan Jackson. Our little team managed to win by 27 in the 8 board match. I still have the score slip. Aside from that, I'm probably best known for the strong pass systems that you see me playing on-line pretty regularly. Todd

Just a couple of requirements on any ratings system that would be developed. First off, somebody should not be given a rating unless the number of their partners and opponents is sufficiently connected to the larger BBO membership. For example, if Meckwell played on BBO but they only played against some other world class pair but not as good as them then if analyzed in isolation then Meckwell would be above average and the other world class pair would be below average. So, there has to be a certain amount of intermixing of partners and opponents for a rating system to have any meaning. Does BBO currently have enough such intermixing for the average player? I don't know but I do know there probably are people who play set games with few enough partner's and opponents that a rating for them wouldn't make any sense. If a ratings system were to be any good then it has to be predictive. One of the big failings of the lehman system I think is that it tried to compute how well a 54/61 pair would do against a 47/52 pair. Moreover, the lehman system treated a 55/55 pair the same as a 50/60 pair which is obviously not try. A pair (except for declarer play) is limited in general by its weakest member. Rather than trying to create another formula (which is pure guess work), I think the right approach is to have a 4-dimensional matrix where each dimension represents the ability of one of the people at the table. This matrix is initialized at week 1 with some guess as to what the result should be but each entry in the matrix is itself a weighted moving average so after each board (or possibly once a week/day) that entry itself is updated to reflect the actual score seen. So, if a 50/60-55/55 matrix entry is initially 0.0 and the 55/55 pair win 5 IMPs on a board then the 55/55 pair will move up slightly to 55.2/55.2 the 50/60 pair move down slightly to 49.8/59.8 and the matrix entry moves up slightly to 0.2. Then we'd have to deal with issues like fractional ratings and how to look those up in the matrix. Moreover, they may be specific ratings combinations that are rarely seen in actual play and so those matrix entries would be updated very slowly. Holding 3 dimensions constant and varying the 4th dimension, the result should be at least be smooth and not-chaotic so to some degree you could change adjacent matrix entries to maintain this property.

Hmm...lots of comments here. People are cheating now in tournaments and at regular tables. Why are they doing this? There doesn't seem to be a reason to me but people are doing it. So, the question is how much worse would this get if there were a ratings system that only a player could see. I dismiss statements like people will be asked to send screenshots to prove their ratings. How many people would even know how to do this? Of those that do, how many would actually bother? Just don't play with people who would make such a silly request. With respect to a kibitzer bot(s) that go around and create ratings and store them external to BBO, nothing is stopping this from happening now. I'm not sure that knowing one person's rating makes this process any easier or better. Somebody also said that all we have to do is to educate people that the ratings system works so that they wouldn't be afraid to play with players of much lower ability. Well, OKB has a ratings system and they have tried to educate people that their system works and accounts for these sorts of issues. Does anybody believe it? I would say very few. It seems like once a rating exists it gets propelled into the public eye. I think some were suggesting that you could limit tables to those above a certain ratings even though you wouldn't be able to see their rating. This sort of creep to public ratings I wouldn't like. The self-rating would still be useful for that purpose.

It would be nice if the software could prevent people from failing to claim tricks that are impossible to lose. Moreover, if the software detects that it is impossible for either side not to get the rest of the tricks then the software can itself claim with a message to everyone at the table saying that the result is inevitable. This would be especially useful at the end of the hand to speed things up. It would also help with those cases where someone gets to a ridiculous contract and claims 0 tricks at trick 1. Those results screw up the scores for everyone. So, to sum up, whenever someone claims, have the software check to see if it is impossible any possible line of play to take that number of tricks. Also, the software could make automatic claims when the result on all possible lines of play are identical.

I would be in favor of a ratings system so long as there would be absolutely no way for people to see each other's ratings. I don't care how complicated the ratings system is so long as it is an accurate indicator. I don't have to understand it. Do people really believe that most people understand even the lehman system? Todd

Let people innovate and they will come up with great add-ons to BBO. I would suggest some sort of interface with the client such that people could write plug-ins to the client and keep track of stuff like average score with each partner. The BBO server has enough scalability problems as it is without having to maintain this sort of information. That isn't to say that the server is written poorly just that any centralized system has the potential to be a bottleneck. The other reason to do it this way is that Uday can add a plug-in interface to the client once and thereafter people can innovate in parallel with Uday's other work. My real wish would be for a skinnable interface like WinAmp. Todd

Doesn't the ACBL mandate that an appeals committee be available? Seeing what I consider some incompetent people directing ACBL tourneys online this scares me a little bit. I like the idea of the appeals committee as a back-up. Now that I think about it, if there were an appeals mechanism then there would probably be a lot less arguing with directors. Directors could just say "appeal it" and people could choose to do so with the current punishments for frivolous appeals. Perhaps we'd need new punishments in the online era but it is doable. Todd

Free: You forgot Pass=0-10. That is the 4th range. Luke's suggestion reminded me of a possibility. Maybe we multiplex the super strong hands into 1D (which would have to be forcing) and then make an impossible rebid to show the super strong hand. This would probably prevent much preemption since 11-15 would be so prevalent. If they did preempt and opener takes a super strong action then responder is better placed to know what opener has. I'll have to think about this some more. Todd

One problem with SAYC and 2/1 is the huge range of the intermediate hands...11 to 21 points. Precisionish systems overcome this huge problem but create a smaller problem in that opener has a huge range on the high end, 16-30+. In some competitive scenarios (the inevitable "I'm playing against precision" preempt) it can be tough for responder to know what to bid then or later when opener has such a large range. So, I've been tinkering with the idea of a 4 range system rather than the 3 ranges that both SAYC, 2/1 and precision use. So, in the precision case you'd limit the 1♣ opener to 20 or 21 points. Then you'd have a super-strong opening for 22+. You wouldn't want to waste a low-level bid to show such an infrequent hand so I was thinking of rolling these hands into 2♠. You can roll the weak 2 spade hand into 2♥ so that 2♥ is a preempt in either major. If you don't need 2♦ systemically to show a hand short in diamonds then then the super-strong hand could use this bid. Any thoughts? Todd

I was looking for a tourney that finished yesterday. In fact, I can't even see the list of tourneys at all. I click on the "here to access the leaderboards from recent tournaments" link and it just spins and spins and then tells me the site cannot be contacted. Yet, if I enter my BBO name and click to get my results for the past few days it works. Todd

I thought it was this: Stratified: everyone plays in the same session but masterpoint awards are allocated based on one's strata, i.e., how many masterpoints you currently have. Strati-flighted: people are divided into different sections based on how many masterpoints you have and you don't play against people from different strata. Often, flights B and C will be grouped together and flight A will play by itself. In this case, masterpoint awards are still stratified within the flight B/C sections. Personally, I'd like to see 16 or 18 board tourneys with half MP and half IMP. Todd

I'm having problems getting to the latest tourney summary page from www.bridgebase.com/myhands. Anybody else having the same problem? Todd

West can't logically put any order to the suits unless he knew what North would lead but West claimed before he saw the lead. If North leads a diamond then declarer can save the ♥2 until last. If North leads a club then hearts must be taken before diamonds or spades. It is interesting that people are assuming that the order of cards listed is explicitly listing a line of play. If I want to state a line of play I'll describe very specifically the tricks I'll take along with entry descriptions, etc. On the question of different standards for IMPs or MPs, I think in certain cases it may be useful to use a different standard but when you're in a 20pt 3N with no club lead and a 2nd heart being covered and spades splitting and have a guaranteed 3N+1 (assuredly a near top) then it doesn't make any sense to risk the contract for what will likely be a meaningless extra 30 points with 3N+2. There are definitely differences of opinion here so we have to get everyone on the same page that 1C+2H+2S+1D is specifying an order. What would you say if you didn't want to specify an order? Are you saying I can't either claim a fixed number of tricks or specify the extra order and number of tricks but there is no middle ground?

For all of these, defense at least gets the benefit of the doubt in assuming that clubs will be led next. The case already described. Adjust to -1. On the club lead declarer must cash hearts first before going to dummy so it is the same as above, adjust to -1. Do people assume that the order implies something? I've never assumed or believed that. Therefore, this case is the same as the above 2. Same as above. Here I believe he has misclicked 7 instead of 6 and he gets awarded 6 more tricks. There is the remote possibility that he intended to say "3H" rather than 2H but especially since only 2 hearts are good I think the most likely case is that the 7 was the misclick. Same as above. Appears to be a misclick. Declarer gets 6 tricks. He gets 6 tricks. This is a tough one. I would tend to think that the explicit statement of what tricks are going to be taken takes precedence over the sum of the number of said tricks. Either he misclicked 6 when he meant 7 (in which down 1 is in order) or he can't add (explicit list takes precedence) or he misclicked the "3H." Maybe a question is in order to ask the declarer to rectify his claim...saying...hey...one part is inconsistent with the other...what did you mean? If he rectifies to 7 tricks then he is down 1 if he says he only meant 2H then he gets his 6 tricks. I don't think asking the inconsistency to be resolved would create UI. Order to me is not important so same as above. Finally, the correct claim. He gets 6 tricks.

How about this as an option. Once a claim is rejected, statements are collected from all parties involved and are saved. Then, play of the board continues. At the end of the board, all parties are asked if they are satisfied with the result. If they are then the record of the rejected claim is not sent to the director. If they are not satisfied then the original claim situation along with statements are sent to the director. I'm not sure about sending the rest of the hand...what do others think? I think that McBruce's suggestion is ideal but I just worry about TD overload and the potentially large number of rejected claims to be dealt with most of which will be routine. My suggestion was an attempt to filter out some of the simpler cases. Todd

I believe Gweny says in her conditions of contest that the worldwide laws of bridge apply. Even if she doesn't, that has to be the assumption. If you don't want to use those laws then you should have to explicitly say they are not in force. I would say that I'm more a stickler for the philosophy behind the rules than the rules themselves. I don't think it is unreasonable to establish an online rule that says play can continue after a rejected claim. However, the philosophy behind the current rules is good and I think would dictate that declarer now has potential UI after a rejected claim. At a minimum, he must make an honest attempt to make the number of tricks that he claimed. If everyone explained when they claimed then most of the miscounts and misclicks would be taken care of by the explanation. However, without an explanation, we must believe that they meant what they said when they clicked the number of tricks. In some cases, I believe that UI may enter into the mix just with a defender's request for an explanation or a rejected claim. Explanations after the fact are subject to an analysis for how self-serving they are. Whatever we end up doing with the rules for online claiming, there has to be a punishment mechanism for the unethical abuse of said system. Sure, in most cases there is absolutely nothing at stake...no masterpoints are awarded and there are no ratings but that actually causes a problem because there is no way to punish people for bad behavior. What upset me so is that the only thing resembling punishment is an admonition from a TD and that wasn't forthcoming. If the case was fuzzy then I wouldn't have pressed the issue but I believe that those skilled in the law and the philosophy of the laws would get the right answer to this one. I think most people would be really upset if they thought their opponent behaved unethically and the director dismissed it. I think we need an ethics committee that can review suggestions from TD's for punishment and can also handles appeals from non-TDs. This committee would have the power to ban a player from BBO for some numbers of days as punishment or maybe a temporary scarlet letter.

Free...West is not going to know that hearts don't split until he has played the last heart and then it is too late. He plays two more hearts and will still believe that hearts have split. I was already out of this tourney (it was a survivor) and was still lobbying that the opps score be adjusted so it was not about me winning. It was about what I thought was a violation of ethics. He won't know hearts don't split and he'll play the third heart and our clubs will run. Honestly, at this point, what people think the rules SHOULD be is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is what the rules are. Just like people get punished for reneging when it has no effect, misclaiming without explanation may have a negative effect when there is a reasonable or expected line of play that does not result in the stated line of tricks. The rules state that the benefit of the doubt goes to the non-offenders. If you've ever reviewed the appeals from a NABC, you'll see that self-serving statements like "I miscounted or misclicked" are dismissed as self-serving because to accept such statements would make it impossible to punish people who are behaving unethically. Gweny. By the time I could have called you to the table and explained the situation the round would have already expired. It took 15 minutes to explain the situation after the round was over so there is no reason to believe it would have been faster at the table. I like the way somebody else put it. Reject the claim and let play continue but declarer can never do better than he would have had had the play stopped at the time of misclaim. You were free to ask the declarer after the hand about the claim but such a question is irrelevant because if declarer has behaved unethically at the table he will lie about it afterwards. He'll simply say "misclick" and expect everything to be better. Even if you were called to the table at the time of the misclaim and had asked declarer to explain, I am still going to argue that the request for an explanation will make declarer reassess the situation and claim only the 6 tricks he is absolutely sure he has. If he then claims he misclicked, it is still a self-serving answer. Where there is smoke there is fire. There is no reason to believe he didn't mean to take 7 tricks when he claimed 7. The only possibility of 7 is the last heart and declarer made no attempt to take 7 tricks after the claim. Did you read my previous post Gweny? I acknowledge there are a number of reasons why a bad claim can be made including benign reasons like misclick. However, what you seem to be willing to do is to give unethical declarers an easy way out by allowing them to say "misclick." As far as I am concerned, you and everyone you consulted that agrees with you do not understand how to apply the laws of bridge to this situation nor do you understand why the laws exist as they do. I too have consulted certified TDs and expert players and they largely agree with me. As you can see, most of the posts in this thread have agreed than an adjustment is in order.

The laws of bridge can be cruel. In face-to-face bridge, defenders are punished for reneging whether or not the renege had any effect on the play or not. Declarer can be given tricks for the defender's renege that he could not possibly get otherwise. Why does this rule exist? It could have been worded differently. It could have just said in case of renege you re-establish equity. Under this modified rule, if the renege had no negative effect on declarer than there would be no penalty. Yet, this is not the rule. The rule is that defenders get punished for the renege whether it was accidental or intentional, with effect or without effect. If the rule was just that you had to reestablish equity then there would be no disincentive for people to intentionally renege. You could always claim your finger slipped or the card was hidden by another card and we would have people out there intentionally reneging and then claiming it was an accident. The same principle should apply in this case. There has to be a disincentive for 1) declarer to intentionally claim more tricks than he thinks he has and 2) to use the UI that his claim was rejected. Just like accidently reneging and giving declarer a trick he can't otherwise get feels awful, a declarer who claims without explanation, gets the claim rejected and then continues playing in such a way that he could not possibly score the number of tricks he had claimed shall be considered guilty of #1 or #2. "Misclick" or "miscount" cannot be accepted as an explanation because there is then no disincentive to do #1 or #2. You cannot prove that you misclicked rather than used UI any more than you can prove that you accidently reneged. I most certainly believe that he believed his last heart was good. Another red card was played on the second rounds of hearts and it would be easy not to notice it wasn't a heart. We should provide incentives for people to claim with full explanations rather than without explanations. If he had made a full explanation saying he intended to take 3 hearts then we wouldn't be having this discussion because everyone should agree that the result in that case is down 1. So why is it that he is getting rewarded for making a bad claim with no explanation? I see no reason why the same principles of face-to-face bridge shouldn't apply here. If you claim in real life without explanation and your claim isn't good then defender's get the benefit of the doubt. That is your punishment for not explaining your claim. You said "I'll keep on playing the same way I was planning to" when one of your claims is rejected. In this case, it is clear the declarer did not take a line of play that could possibly result in the number of tricks he had claimed so this case is different from most rejected claims in that most declarers end up taking the same amount of tricks they had originally claimed by playing the hand out. By allowing declarer to simply say "I miscounted" allows them to intentionally do this without any possibility of punishment. Miscounting hearts is such a clear possibility on this hand that most people are saying it is probable that is what happened. I'm not arguing that the defense can make declarer do ridiculous things like playing A and K on the same trick from Ax opposite Kx but defense gets the benefit of the doubt when there is a strong possibility that declarer has erred in their thinking. On the hand in question, playing the last heart is certainly not a ridiculous play if hearts have split, in fact it is the best play. There is no reason to not believe that that is what declarer intended.

During a tourney a few minutes ago, the host of the tourney reminded us to follow the tourney rules in the conditions of contest page. I had read them once upon a time but wanted to refresh my memory. Alas, conditions of contest are not accessible are they when the tourney has started and you're at a table? Todd

I believe it was case #1. It would have done no good to stop play because director would have been called and told play to continue. I think it is safe to say this because after a lot longer time to review, they still couldn't come to the right decision. When you claim without offering an explanation, I believe you should lose a lot of your rights. Merely the opponents asking for an explanation may cause you to play more safely. For example, if you say "claiming 7, 2H,2S,1C,1D" then a strong case can be made that declarer simply misspoke (or misclick) 7 instead of 6. However, with no explanation, the non-offending side is given the benefit of the doubt in bridge. Believing a self-serving statement such as a miscount or misclick gives people no reason to not try this in the future. This principle is applied across the board in bridge to stop people from even trying unethical behavior like intentionally reneging. In this case, once you claim 7 tricks without explanation and play continues you should be forced to attempt to make 7 more tricks.

I'll keep all the guilty parties anonymous but something happened tonight that has ticked me off royally. [hv=n=skq5h4dkj64ckjt52&w=s72hak872d87ca984&e=sajt64ht9dat532c6&s=s983hqj653dq9cq73]399|300|[/hv] 3N by West. H4,H9,HJ,HK S2,S5,ST,S3 HT,HQ,HA,D4 S7,SQ,SA,S8 ST,S9,C4,SK At this point, the hand is as follows: [hv=n=skq5h4dkj64ckjt52&w=s72hak872d87ca984&e=sajt64ht9dat532c6&s=s983hqj653dq9cq73]399|300|[/hv] Now, declarer claims 7 more tricks? No explanation...just a claim for 7 tricks. 2S+1D+1D+2H is only 6 tricks. Where else could declarer think his 7th trick is coming from except for the H2? Defense rejects the claim and leads a small club to the Q and A. Declarer now doesn't make any attempt at all to take 7 tricks (including the CA). He takes his 6 obvious winners and gives up. Either declarer misclicked 7 winners (which he never said) or he thought he had 7 winners and the rejection of the claim woke him up and he realized his H2 wasn't good. Certainly the rejection of the claim is UI to declarer and he should continue with his originally intended line of play to make 7 more tricks. If he does this, he'll try to cash the H2 before leaving his hand and south will win and NS will take their clubs to set the contract. In an ideal world, play would stop after a claim is rejected and a director would determine a result but that would take too long and we know that the director would just say play the hand out. I don't have that much of a problem with that but you have to be ethical and not use UI. Does he have UI? His claim has been rejected by strong opponents. Did he use the UI here? I think it is extremely clear that he did. I requested an adjustment from the director (after I had already been eliminated from the tourney) on this board and the directorial staff couldn't even agree that there is UI here. This case is so blatant in my opinion and I'm shocked at the disregard the players and the directors had for ethics and rules of bridge in this case. Please oh please give me the ability to give feedback on directors who have such a minimalist grasp of the rules.

Uday and Fred, Would we keep a running average of our score thus far in each tourney? You could put it in the same position where the tourney result already goes in the window (once the tourney is over). Sometimes I want to see how we're doing and have to do the addition by hand. thanks, Todd

I will probably be on-line at that time if you need help. My BBO ID is DrTodd.