hotShot

To me "tp play" means that I expect my partner to pass this bid. But he does not have to pass!

If we have a double fit, they have one too. THe only way they can find out about that now, is me bidding 5♦. With this double fit, they can easyly have a hand that makes 5♣. I don't believe in the second trick in ♠. I vote for 5♠

I am sugggesting to give a clue to the clueless, not finding the philosophers stone. A modified query to the myhands database would do well enough. All you need is the number of boards linked to 2 ID's. No extra monthly costs, since the myhands database is allready there. and it is current! Well using a lot of ID's, is of cause a problem. I would not care, if i'm fooled by players that create a new ID each time they log on. But this behaviour might indicate the intention to cheat. Uday once pointed out, that a banned player cannot log in, even with a new ID. So if one cared, and with a little more time, one could implement some sort of alarm is someone is having more than xy ID's.

As you have proved, there is no need to create a new database, as the information is in the one you have. Implementing an request that counts the number of boards a pair played, will not take long. We can discuss if it is useful. Being a TD online, have no chance to see what has happend. You do not know the players, you don't even know if they don't answer you because of the lack of English, or the lack of politeness. Than you have to make decisions, which side to believe. You have to do that at f2f bridge too, but you can look into the players eyes and faces, allowing you to use your full social abilities. You can even ask other players it this happend before. If players tell you they have never played before and if the number of board is 0. I would think they might not have an agreement. If they played 1000 hands, i would think, they might have some sort of inplicit agreement. I don't know how many boards are needed, somewhere one has to draw the line. But at least you might have a hint. This is better than what you have now, making a unlawfull adjust leaving everybody including yourself very unsatisfied.

Where should we discuss what happend at BBO, if not here? I think your approach is the best possible. If i realy want to know the names, i could sent a message to the poster in privat.

A lot of times, TD's have to decide if a partnership has an agreement or not. To do this it would be very helpful, to ask the database, about the number of boards a pair has played together within the timespan that is coverd by the database. This way it should be possible to see, if a new pickup partnership was formed for this tourney, or if a partnership is playing frequently. If a pair hast played e.g. 0 boards together within the last 4 weeks, i would belive they do not have an agreement, while i would lean much harder on a pair that played 100 boards together within that time.

The rules don't require that you bid your longest suit, they don't even require that your bids describe your hand. They order you to, reveal all partnership agreements. In face2face bridge you know if a pair plays on a regular basis, online you have to guess. So as director you have to decide: 1) Was the alert realy missing? 2) Did you have a damage? 3) Is the missing alert responsible for the damage? Only if you answer all 3 questions with yes, adjust the score. No partnership agreement answer 1) with no => no adjustment The question why the 1♥ bid was choosen is irrelevant, but it might help to discover, if there is a partnership agreement. Where you damaged? well 3NT should not make => yes there is damage Is the missing alert responsible for the bad result? NO! How would it help you to know that East might have longer ♠ than♥? It would still be more likely to assume he has got only 4. As far as you know West could hold 3rd ♦Q. If East had only 4 ♠ after your small ♦ lead, he would still make it. East and you think that west hast a ♦ stop, but he has not. The 5th ♠ just makes the overtrick.

The decision is wrong: 1) If you play 15-17 an adjustment of 1hcp is allways legal 2) there are limitations about single's, void's and 5 card majors, but nothing about a 6 card minor But, in F2F Brdige i would want to see a CC to prove your NT range. But this would perhaps lead to a procedural penalty, and not to a score correction.

And here is where I wanted to land. You are bypassing 200 vs 100, and much very important 100 vs 500 and 200 vs 800. You don't need to take these into account, because: What we say is, that you should bid game with 9.4 tricks in the majors. If you can fall twice you did not have those. If opponents double, you will gain 12 IMPs or loose 8 IMPs, you break even with 40% games here. Ben's analysis did not contain those hands, where opps defended against your game.

In the dialog where you can mark someone as friend, you can enter a comment. I use this comment to enter partnership agreements. This way i can look at my partners profile, and check my comment if needed.

Well the IMP-Scale is not linear and i think it is a litte easyer: If we make it, we gain 10 IMPs (620 vs 170). If we loose (-100 vs 140), we loose 6 IMPs. I want to get at least even, means sum has to be larger than 0. 10x + ( -6 * (1-x) ) >= 0 16x -6 >= 0 x>= 6/16 = 37.5% Not vul: If we make it, we gain 6 IMPs (420 vs 170). If we loose (-50 vs 140), we loose 5 IMPs. 6x + ( -5 * (1-x) )>=0 11x -5 >=0 x>= 5/11 = 45.45%

First of all, if we discuss how much weaker one should try game vul at imps, we should say what we normaly do. Openings got lighter, eg. NT shrinked from 16-18 down to 12-14. and i even see 11-13 sometimes. Opening a suit with 11 hcp is not rare, some do it even with 4card suits. If you play an agressive system, you probably should not take more rist when vul. Even non vul at IMPs there is a small advantage for bidding game. So people playing @IMPs bid a little more agressive. Finally I object to using boards from the main bridge club to do the evalation. The thing that pickup partnerships lack most, is a good playing defence. You can do your bidding ok, by using "safty belts". If you are declarer, your play does not depend on your partner (at least it should not :) ). It is my BBO experiance, that you win lots of IMPs with a good defence. Now a little Math: Each board is played 16 times, one result is yours making 15 references. Asume you made 620 the others did 0 * 620 and 15* 170 leading to: (0*0 IMPs + 15* 10 IMPs) /15 = 150/15 = 10 IMPs that is what we planned. But for each result that is equal to ours, we loose 10/15 IMPs. (1* 0 IMPs + 14* 10 IMPs)/15 = 140/15 = 9,3333 IMPs If 8 pairs bid game an 8 did not we get: (7 * 0 IMPs + 8 * 10 IMPs)/15 = 80/15 = 5,3333 IMPs Cross-Imps shrink the win you can make, depending on the number of shared results. Since you cannot predict the number of shared results, it is hard to calculate the chances. But a good rule of thumb would be, if half the field is with you in this decicion, you get half the reward you get at IMPs. If your result is unshared, you get the full result.

I don't think it is a good strategie, to change the point ranges of the bids. To make game with minimum HCP you need perfect fit or some distribution. What I do vulnerable at IMPs is to give my distribution a little more weight. Arguments to upgrade my hand are for example: A short suit and an extra trump A "long" solid side suit If it's likely to have a double fit Opponents bid suggests well placed values Indication of "right" values e.g. aces in p short suits, help in his long suits

Playing an online tourney one has to take a risk once in a while to get an extra IMP or two. Dbl is clearly penalty, but West is a little weak, but Opps jump to 4 ♠ could be a weak game try. The risk is minimal opps get 590 instead of 420. not too expencive, but when they fall, we get a few extra against those playing 3♠ or falling in 4 without dbl. West dbl is a optimistic taktical bid. Now East takes it as takeout, ***** happens..... 5♥ / 6♦ / 6♥ i won't say what i think of these bids, so Ben won't have to remove my comment. redbl deserves an report to abuse@...., this is clearly punishing partner and ruin everybody elses score.

dear double_! If NS's system has no bid to show a hand with one 4card major and a second suit, blame it on the system. North sees only his 12 hcp, East 's pass suggests less than 6hcp, leaving at least 23 hcp for opener and partner. What can he expect after south first pass? Take a look at this topic where they suggest to open 1minor with a 22hcp hand. So North has every reason to believe that west holds 18+ hcp. When it is north turn to bid a second time, both east and south have passed his bid. East should have bid a 4 card major with 6+hcp, but he did not. If East had none, he holds at least 7 cards in the minors. If East had a ♣ raise, he would have done it. So East is eather to weak raise or long in ♦. Does South promise a 5 card major, if bidding after East's pass? NS took over the bidding, i think bidding a 4card major would be ok, if he's strong enough. How strong does South need to be? Since North bid 1♦ i guess bidding double instead, would have shown a stronger hand. With reasonable strength South should have keept the bidding open, as North could be strong. South judged his hand not to be strong enough, to keep the bidding open. I can accept that, ♣ values seem badly placed, and ace of ♠ is just one trick. Do you think South would have passed with a ♦ void? I don't think so. Now West finds a double, he is strong, forcing East to bid, showing shortness in ♦. Why on earth should north bid now? If all pass, his 6 looser hand might make 7+ tricks dbled fine. If East bids, North can make a decision later, as you say he has the spades he can still bid them later. If South has reason to run, he can do so, even if North passes. By bidding North avoids any information he could get from East's or South's bidding. By bidding he implies that it is not a good idea to play ♦. By bidding he makes sure that South knows the missing ♥ stopper. By bidding he excludes South from the descision, this is why North is responsible. Now tell me: Why should South bid 2♦ , if North decides better not to play 1♦? Why should South bid 1NT, knowing there are no enough ♥ stopper and the ♣ values are badly placed? Why should South bid 2♣, if his LHO opened that suit? Why should South bid ♥, knowing that opps will have a fit there? North decided to bid his hand vul. He decided that even if Partner is weak and West is very strong, he wants to play the hand. There is no reason to defend against a partscore in R/w. North claimed to be stronger or better distributed than opener., and he is not

Hi Anna! I sometimes have that kind of problem too. Usually i can pinpoint it on one of the following problems: 1) A lack of physical memory 2) Another application working hard 3) background network activity (is related to 1) ) comment at 1: System, Firewall, Virusscanner, Spysoftware protection and other tools use a lot of memory. If you open a webbrowser and your mail application your system might have used up more than 100MB of physical memory. At a certain point windows starts to enlage its swapfile, a process that has the highest priority and causes any other process to allmost stop for a moment. If you run more than just the bbo software and you have less than 512 MB physical memory this might be the problem. You can use the task manager to see the ratio of physical memory to virtual memory. comment at 2: I assume that you won't render a video or somthing like that while playing at BBO, but there are some applications that do a heavy workload running as a background task e.g. your weakly virusscan, microsofts indexing service or your webbrowser executing some repeating javascript loops or animations. Even playing mp3-Files uses a little of your cpu power. Again you can use the task manager to see the cpu load of your system. comment at 3: If you don't have 90+% cpu usage, and a lot of physical memory left this might be your problem. Moving large amount of data, e.g. using a network printer, share files or p2p-networks can cause a lot of hardware interrupts, this can slow windows down. The same effect can be caused by TV- or sound-cards. Another possibility are interrupt problems caused by windows, if it is allowed to install "plug and play" hardware. Windows allows shared interrupts, older versions often put all p&p-Hardware at the same interrupt. Copying or moving files the system needes buffer space, if your amount of free physical memory is low, the system needs to move blocks from physical memory to the virtual memory on you harddisk.causing you system to slow down. hotShot

North 1♠ is a plain stupid bid after West's dbl. He has a long good ♦ suit, and no need to run. West should have at least 7 cards in the majors and is definitly short in ♦. North knows that opps won't like the ♠ and ♦ split, he has every reason to believe that south has at least 4-4 in ♥ and ♣, since he did not raise the ♦ suit and east did not raise the ♣. So if east was to weak to raise with fit, north should let south decide what do. So from south poit of view: Why did north make the decision? Why didn't north dbl, instead of 1♦ to show a 2 suited hand with a major? Could north bid be canape style? Can north have a 5-5 distribution? Could 1♦ be a psyche? 7 tricks are easyer to get than 8 tricks, and south can still run if opps decide to dbl. South does not know of a ♦ fit, only if north has at least 2♣ there is a fit. It is obvious that north does not have a ♥ stop and south doesn't have one too. Even with 4-1 fit , opps cannot make as many ♥ tricks as they could if the contract was NT. I would assign north at least 80% of the blame.

We go: 3♦ (weak) - 4♦ (RCKB with ♦) 4♠ (1/4 KC) - 5♣ (Kings?) 6♦ ( No, but single somewhere (5♦ would show 0/3, so one must be enough for 6))

Of cause it is possible to implement one, but the build in random generator is limited by the system and the seed is given as an argument. This argument must be in a native format, in this case a 4 byte integer. This is why serious deal programs have to have their own random generator and a "handmade" library to handle very long integers.

The largest integer number a random generator on a 32 bit system can deliver is (2^31)-1. This is much smaller than the total number of possible deals at bridge. So a lot of algorithms use more than one random number to shuffle the cards. But the random numbers a computer generates are not random, so there is a chance to get the same series of random numbers again, if the random generators seed is the same. Since the seed is often an integer number, there are only (2^31)-1 possible seeds. Leading to only as many different deals. So more has to be done to make sure any possible deal can be shuffled (easy to do) and with the same propabillity (very hard to do).

Please don't Quote only a part of the bridge laws it is not only: F-U-L-L D-I-S-C-L-O-S-U-R-E but F-U-L-L D-I-S-C-L-O-S-U-R-E o-f p-a-r-t-n-e-r-s-h-i-p a-g-r-e-e-m-e-n-t-s agreeing on SAYC, 2/1 or 'you name it' of cause, brings a full load of agreements with it. Here at BBO without anything said, the system is BBO-Basic (which is close to SAYC). So everyone playing something else should inform opps prior to the first bid of a round. As TD you should enforce alerting, on any system. But because those playing Polish Club or Precision, will usually know BBO-Basic/SAYC better as the other way round. THe disadvantage is more on one side. You should warn the players not alerting and check if the score needs to be corrected. Often there is no need to adjust, because not alerting alone is not enough to result in a score correction. There has to be a connection betreen the missing alert and e.g. a missing contract or a wrong lead from the opps.

I can understand your anger! And I agree that the board should have been adjusted. A TD should allways try to find all boards that are Ave- and try to adjust them if possible. Would be a nice feature if TD's could get a list of AVE- boards at request, so that they can be checked even if not called by a player. I use to look at the tourney status, the last minute of a round and note the tables that are not ready yet. I like to play with 1 board/round so that you meet as many other pairs as possible, but in a survivor or swiss kind of movement it is very likely that tables with an AVE- result are recreated in the next round. But even with 2 boards/round often slow players are mixed with other slow players that did not finish in time. Both effects lead to a new round with unfinished boards. Adjusting the results usualy helps.

I think the big average per board is a result of: 1) big differences in the playing and bidding ability of the field 2) "random" partnerships without proper agreements 3) tournament tactic, at imps and few boards you need big scores, so you play high risk and produce big scores often against you 4) unbalanced movement (if you play 2 or 3 boards / round and get the right victims you can produce many imp's)

If a player has an emergency, than he will/can leave bbo. If a player just wants to subscribe to a tourney, he would want to reserve his seat. So i suggest a dialog like the shutdown dialog of windows. If you leave a table it should ask if you want to: 1) leave after this board 2) leave bbo immediately 3) leave for a moment, seat reserved If one selects 1 everything is fine. If one selects 2, bbo should not accept a login for the next 10 or 15 minutes. If someone has an emergency, he will not try to reconnect within that time. If someone is just being rude, it will be faster to leave after the board. In case of 3 perhaps host and/or partner have to approve the leaving.

We have playing TD's at club level in offline bridge. Playing TD's are no problem as long as the workload is small. Meaning not more than 10 tables, unclocked so that time causes no adjustments. And of cause announce that you are playing TD.