ThymePuns

I have a massive screen, yet somehow it lacks the space to display both the play of the hand and the auction at the same time. I feel stuck choosing the Flash version until that is resolved.

Nice match, nullve. Nice format, hrothgar; thanks for putting it together.

Is this on again? It's really annoying. It is not possible for me to express to my friends my thoughts on Farage without using certain proscribed words. There must be a better way than indiscriminately censoring it.

In my match against Broze: 1-16 Broze +7 17-32 thymepuns +21 33-35 thymepuns +15 36-48 Looks like Broze timed out 49-64 not played

I won both matches and had a total of 3 beers. Nice matches shyams and steve2005!

Nice match. Results were random enough, but I got two beers and that's what really counts.

What is the rule for beers? Does gib owe me or does my challenger?

These threads are tl;dr, so I need secretary (bird) kuhchung to tell when to sit in front of the computer and play robobridge.

Thanks!

It's broken. Is that temporary or is it gone? :(

You can just use persistent cookies instead of session cookies. You wouldn't do that if you were logging into anything important since it's not very secure, but shouldn't be any problem for something this low risk.

A placeholder that showed the hand was played but basically nothing else. Two reasons for this. 1) A better user experience where you hide only what you need to until you log. It will be faster when you aren't looking for a robo hand, but you haven't to do a "am I logged in?" check every time you're not seeing a hand you expected (which would often be a time selection problem). It's better to list everything you before logging in so that when you do log in, you haven't lost your place, so to speak. 2) Uniquely for me, I also want to use this to load the number of hands a user has played as we'll use this as part of our youth program.

How about this implementation? 1) No log required to do the main search (as before) 2) Instant and Robot Dupe show don't show the contract, result, or percentage. 3) Instead, it has a link to log in. 4) When logged in, it then shows everything filled in if it's your tournament, otherwise a note. This might make things a bit better, though doesn't address all the concerns above. General principle here is to only protect what needs to be protected. Right now, it's authorizing too early and authenticating on a bit more than needed. Also, another improvement would be to use longer cookies for authorization. For something as low risk as this, there's no reason to require logging back in frequently. Having it last a month would be quite sufficient and much more usable.

My opponents always seem to play Reverse Tellmeeverything when these types of hands come up.

I have good trump so partner has an obvious double.

The main goal is to just get them playing. When a new hand starts, they will see the contract and if they're declaring, the lead and dummy, and it will be just play of the hand. They won't have to look at the auction area of the screen at all. A secondary goal is just to get them familiar with the mechanics of bidding (not necessarily any bidding system). If they figure out how it works and get excited to learn it, then that's great. GIB bids similarly enough that if a student picked up on the bidding, they wouldn't have to unlearn too much. I wouldn't expect them to, though, but if they do express interest in moving onto bidding, then I can move them onto those lessons. The main idea is for the students to do something without any instructor. Both of these solutions require me to either be present or to send hands ahead of time. I do teaching tables if I'm actually teaching students, but I want them to be able to practice without my help. Setting up hands directly would be difficult to constrain. Students at this level don't know even the mechanics of the auction, so it would take detailed instruction to get the hands, import them, rent robots, and what to bid at each turn.

I teach bridge to kids and adults, and in both cases, I teach play of the hand first and don't get to bidding for some time. I'd like to be able to give my students simple instructions to go to the home page and click something like "Just Play Bridge" to get started. Easiest solution would be to have all 4 GIBs bid and then have the player take over to play or defend. I teach MiniBridge where the contract is set with a formula, and that could be programmed, too, but that seems to be less useful for general audiences.

kuhchung says "limit raise" He's really changed since he turned 50. Now all he does is upvote things. I would also make a limit raise, though at IMPs I might try 4S if partner has shown 5+.

1H (P) 2H showing support is my favorite treatment -- for the opponents to play! Knowing that they have at least an 8-card fit just makes it totally obvious to know when to compete. I much prefer 2H to show 1-5 hearts so the opponents are in the dark on whether to bid or not. I mean, sure, it can be useful to actually play in a suit where you have 8 or more cards between the two hands, but you just lose way too much in competitive auctions.

Congratulations!

In the same auction, someone once asked me if it was a jump shift.

One of my partners likes to put down five suits: spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs, and aces.

Please explain further.

Firstly, I enjoyed the USA 1 vs. USA 2 match immensely and believe it's a better way kibitz bridge than anything else out there. Still, there are some ways to improve that can make it an even greater experience. Some of these may already be on the road map, but hopefully some of my ideas will be new and helpful. Not all the ideas apply exclusively to matches like these, but they would probably be most beneficial in such matches. 1. Audio quality This was very distracting. Kit's audio was particularly bad, but everyone was having problems at one point or another. Probably the easiest way to improve this is to have everyone use better headsets. Twit.tv, a podcasting network, sends Plantronics 400 DSP Headsets to its remote contributors, and they always sound pretty good to me. They look affordable enough to send to frequent voice contributors. 2. Enabling individual commentators This is the part of the experience that I found most confusing. Wanting to mute a specific commentator seems to be the 1% case. In order for the voice to really transcend text chat, commentators should have a real conversation; muting a participant and hearing only one side of the conversation seems like it would be a bad experience almost all of the time. I'm sure there are some people who just don't like certain commentators, and maybe that's what was in mind for this feature, but I'd suspect this is uncommon. The way I would present the feature is when you for the first time enter a vugraph room that has voice, it pops up, "Would you like to enable voice commentary?" and then after the answer is given, the dialog has a closing animation to the right side of the chat where a permanent "enable/disable" (or "play/stop") button resides. Underneath that, the individual commentators are simply listed and the VU is nice to see who is speaking. If we need the ability to mute individuals, a "mute" button could be added here, but default would be all on or all off. The slider for the individual commentators also seems out of place. Picking and mixing individuals is not something that a kibitzer is going to want to do. I suggest having a "host" to handle the mixing as well (more on that below) 3. Host role I'll mention twit.tv again because I think they've really nailed how to do collaborative podcasts with a format that shares much with what vugraph could be. An episode of TWiT has a single Host who adds and introduces all the guests, keeps everything moving and the like. Dead air is probably alright for bridge, but it would be good to have someone who can generate a conversation with the other commentators when needed, like during an 8-minute tank (not naming names). That can obviously be a daunting task, but I thought Gavin did a great job. 4. Commentator video I'm not entirely sure how effective this would be, but instead of having the VU for each commentator, you could have a small video feed. This would feel a bit more interactive and might help foster more natural conversations between the commentators. 5. Contract at other table Showing the play of both tables at once is probably excessive for most people, but I do like where it will show me the other table's result instead. Often the play is fairly routine and it's only the contract that really matters. In those instances, seeing the contract at the other table before the result is finished would be nice. This of course could be implemented in all TMs, so maybe there's a good reason you haven't. Some of the existing elements could be combined to better effect. Hovering over "Other table" can show the auction and so could hovering over the score in the Results section. Clicking then would open up the full thing either as a popup or just go to the results tab like today. The idea here is to minimize the context switching by making the most frequently used information easily available in place. 6. Recordings I had to watch the last two sessions on the recorded video which was good, but would have been better using more layers. How many people who watched those tried clicking on the alerts? I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit that I sure did. You should be able to add time information to the .lin files so you could replay the hands in something much like the hand viewer, and the just add the audio and text chat over that. It could be made nearly identical to watching it live. Again, I was very glad to be able to watch such great teams play and the audio commentary really started to make it come to life. I'm hopeful that you'll consider these suggestions as I think they would make it an even better experience.

3♣ isn't safe but I'm going to bid it anyway. I'll bid it very confidently so that they don't double me.