JohnnyHiLo

Hi Kathryn, I was rereading Mike Lawrence's 1982 book "The Complete Book on Overcalls in Contract Bridge" and he considers the 2s cue bid to be a "I have a good hand and I don't know what to do cue bid". The discussion begins on page 161 in chapter called "The Many Faces of the Cue Bid". The next chapter is a quiz on cue bids. In general Lawrence shows hands that have some tolerance for partner's suit but for the most part he is not looking at supporting the original bid suit unless he gives a direct raise. Often, when starting with a minor suit, he is cue bidding for a game in notrump or, as a last resort, landing in 4 of a minor. He rarely bids 5 in a minor. Incidentally, when the original bidder rebids their own suit freely at the 3 level he generally shows them having 6 cards in the suit. Reading those 2 chapters should provide some glimpse of what I was trying to do on that hand. John

Since some of the instructors use bridge hands in their chat logs, I think it would be helpful if you could display them in separate lines and centered for all 4 directions. The person or instructor entering the hands could start with some identifying set of characters to make them visible to the bbo program such as @@@ and then the north east, south and west hands could be entered as Akq 975 kq2 10987 these could be separated by slashes for each direction. Then when the chatter presses enter, the full hand is displayed in multiple lines and centered like it would appear in an edited bridge article. Something similar could be done for a single suit also. Just an Idea, John

Hi, I received the same error you did when running that exact description of the cards. If I entered Q87x and ATx it did figure it out without running out of memory. I couldn't adjust the memory even when I run the program and adjust the memory settings via the properties setting before executing the program (using windows explorer). If I look in the Official Encyclopedia of Bridge in the section on Suit Combinations I find the section where declarer has 7 cards as in this example. Then I look for a generic description where Qxxx is in north (sorry that's as close as it gets) and ATx in south then there are 2 lines suggested. One is for 3 MAX which is to lead small to the Queen and finesse the ten next if it loses, but if west plays the King on the first round then play the Ace next. It says this has a 26 percent chance of success or 2.12 tricks per deal. The other method is for taking 2 tricks. it says to play the Ace then unless the Jack appears from west, lead small to the ten. It says that this results in 2 tricks 94 percent of the time. Enjoy, John :)

I guess I'll reply to my own posting. I think this may be due to connection problems. If you are logged off before exiting the table gracefully (or perhaps BBO?) then what is stored in memory may not be written out to the sequential .lin text file. It seems to me that this could be improved by writing or flushing the write-buffer after each game is clicked. That way you would only loose the current game u are working on. I guess the get around for this bug/feature is to frequently exit legally from the table to make sure you are getting regular write-outs to the .lin file. So I guess I should thank myself for the help. Thanks. John B)

Hi, I composed about 100 hands out of a book and began playing them in at a teaching table using gib as e/w. I did the bidding and played the hands out. Sometimes the play of the hand is recorded for a game or two but when i play many hands it loses most of the hands i play. In one case it even had someone else's name as one of the players. Thanks. John

I have been using a utility called WordChamp at wordchamp.com for helping me translate words in foreign language sites. You install the utility in your toolbar and then press a button to turn the reader on. It translates the page you are on and you can then hover over any word which it highlights and then it provides a translation in your language. The utility covers a large number of languages and some have better dictionaries than others. Users are allowed to update the defintions. If BBO was able to incorporate the utility into the chat area and even into allowing users who want to read some of the foreign language documents online here it would really be appreciated. If a dictionary in a specific language wasn't up to snuf, users who spoke both the to and from languages could quickly add definitions. Thanks. Johnny