hotShot

Blasting to 7NT is not a good bid! You hold 25 HCP and partner opened. He should at least hold 11 HCP. So you could have an Ace missing or there might be a king offside. You don't know anything on partners hand. He might have a weak 6-5 distributed hand. Opps have to be silent, with together less than 10 or more likely 4HCP. You can always force partner to bid on. But it's not a strange bid, trying to play 7NT with expected 36 HCP is not unreasonable.

The first thing i teach my bridge students, even before looking at the cards is that the referee in bridge is called TD and that there are a lot of unintentional 'fouls' that can happen. I tell them to remember that calling the referee is a normal thing. I think all teachers should put more weight on teaching the laws. When i play bridge, i want to have the best possible opponents. If they need to cheat to find the right lead/contract, they will give away a trick later or they compete as if they were strong. Additionally if one is a strong player, one can make much more use of the UI opps exchange....

Just imagine for a moment an ISP/company would decide to hide all their clients behind a firewall (proxy), they would all have the same IP.

Are you sure a 2nd ♠ defense trick is on? With six cards out usually one of the other 3 is single or even void. Often it will be an opponent. So I'll got for 4♠.

With the new colors, a friend name who set the "BRB" is unreadable. Otherwise less bright colors have their merits.

If you went for blood, stick with it.

FD is a nice approach and i am sure that it will work for established partnerships and uncontested auctions. Almost nobody outside the ACBL fully knows what SAYC implies, and I'm not sure that many people from ACBL land know more. So using a default file FD-File is not always a good idea. Entering a system into FD is quite an effort, it can't be done on the fly. Although i have some ideas how this could be improved, we will have to wait for them. Looking at your own convention card is against the law of bridge, as you are not allowed to use memory aids. So if i don't look, i don't know that my opps where missinformed and if i look I'm using illegal means. In competitive bidding FD is bound to know what opps overcall meant. It does matter to the following bidding whether the 1NT overcall in 2nd hand following a 1m bid, shows 16-18 HCP balanced with stopper or raptor style showing 5+ cards in the other minor and 4 cards in an unspecified major. Without that information FD will produce wrong alerts when the overcall meant something different then the FD author expected.

Just tried 4.9.5 at a teaching table and it seems the clicking problem is gone. I had a scollbar problem once playing a tourney using 4.9.3 or 4. The chat area scrollbar was deactivated and i had to open and close the lobby to get the scrollbar working. It was near the end (last board of tourney) or after my table was closed.

Since i use Firefox 2, i can't simply click on the download link, because it automatically closes the empty window that was opened using the link. It seems that the download is canceled at that moment to. So i use "Save target as" to download it, to avoid the problem.

How do you know what south meant to bid? His cards and the explanation fit. You say he was playing unusual 2NT and Michaels, but i don't see that in the given explanation. NS might be playing some home brewed convention. Only if you have any evidence that NS play agreed to play something different than what they disclosed to opps, there might be a case. What i see is: S hand and explanation fit together. N had the choice between a minor and a major and decided to pick the major. West decided that opps are playing something different from what they where disclosing. And got punished for it. No need to correct the score.

I noticed the card click problem too. It is there since the first non classic version. I used to click the card at the bottom near the player name, but it seems that clicking the bottom an area about 10 pixel high, does not take the click. If the selected card moves up, the bottom region of this card is still insensitive. While clicking on the card the sensitive area seems to be displayed in yellow for a moment. This yellow area does not cover the whole card, but leaves a white stripe at the bottom. This area seems to be identical to the insensitive area.

Ben your example has extreme scores of about the same amount at both ends. This is why removing them does not change much. Even using Butler scoring does not make a real difference here. Edit:No x missing, it's -5, stupid me.... Row 15 is missing an X at the contract and are you sure that the 8 in the last column is correct? -500 instead of -200 should make a difference.

How do you calculate the results for the extreme scores? What you describe is Butler scoring.

You have 2 scores: 420 430 At IMPs there is no difference at MP there is all the difference you need. If the results are: 420 420 ... 420 -100 You can give (case 1): +0.4 -0.4 ..... somehow distributed 12 or (case 2) 0 0 .... somehow distributed 12 In case 1 pairs are rewarded / punished for sitting on right / wrong side. In case 2 these pairs will get the same score as they would get in most of the team games. Different scores for these pairs will be produced at other boards. Hopefully related to their play.

CrossIMPS are calculated as the average result of team games teaming you up with every other pair that is sitting at the other direction at the other tables. You can't leave one away, without loosing the base of your scoring system.

The shortest way to improve the CrossIMP's is taking more results/board. Because e.g. with 32 scores/board the noise reduces to 0.5 IMP/Board. Playing in the MBC you never change directions. So if some "unlucky" pair is distorting results it will always be on the same side. (Fortunately there is a good chance that they are not playing the same board as you do again.) That could be optimized by changing directions once in a while.

When we discuss rating, winning an IMP/board is considered a strong performance. Loosing an IMP/board by sitting on the "wrong side" of table does not even matter to you? I will remember that :).

No method is perfect, we all have our preferences, and most threads on this topic finish with everyone agreeing to disagree :P Paul Paul i don't understand what you are trying to say. Gerado asked why anybody would want to prefer Butler to CrossIMP's. The answer to that question is, CrossIMPs are very unfair to almost half of the field, if a board has a very unusual result, especially if there is a dominant score. It does not even matter whether that unusual result was caused by playing perfect bridge or producing utter nonsense. I was not answering the question why someone would not want to use Butler scoring. On BBO especially in the MBC we have a unusual score on most boards. So most boards are scored unfair. Since there are only 16 scores available the unfairness is significant. If there were 100 scores it would be much less relevant. For those boards Butler scoring would definitely be an improvement. I know this modified Butler scoring method, but i don't think it has enough benefits to use it. Original Butler scoring compares everyones score against the average not against the median. Using a median only makes sense if there is one. Using the average is more stable even if there are no scores close to the average.

.... which result is still achieved in X-Imp scoring. You score equally with all of the other players who score the same result as you. It is just not a zero score, because in common with all of the others who also score the same, you all also score the same non-zero result against those in 6S Bridge scoring is far from being fair. It does make a difference what hand you play against which opps. It does make a difference which position you sit at the start of a tourney. With CrossIMPs and MP it also matters which side of the deal you are. People have put tremendous efforts in reducing the noise that is introduced into the result by movement. Letting you play against as many pairs as possible and changing directions as often as possible are the means used to approach equity. The best movement so far is the 7 table Howell. But even in this best movement, two pairs of equal strength can end up e.g. 49% and 46% just because of the position they started. Since side matters CrossIMP results of EW and NS should not be compared. In the MBC a score for NS and OW is given in a way that creates the impression that the results are comparable. At BBO tourneys CrossIMPS are used to declare one winner. So if you want to compare NS and EW result of a board, you have to award both sides 0 IMP's, if they made what the majority made. CrossIMPs as used now fail to do that.

You introduced the par result to the discussion, and is is usually used to describe what a double dummy solver could make. If i were talking of a par result concerning scoring i would define it as: The par result of real life bridge is the result produced by the majority of the player. If real life bridge my team-mates are my choice and i must accept to get a bad result because of this choice. With CrossIMPs (especially at BBOs MBC) i win my team-mates by seating. With CrossIMP's the seating creates a noise of about 1 IMP/Board. I consider that to much.

The beauty /correctness of scoring is that equal performance should lead to equal score. Perfect scoring (team fight): Your table scores NS 4♠= and the other table scores 4♠=. So both teams score 0 IMPs here. If 30 pairs perform equal to this team result and 2 pairs have a different result, there is some beauty giving those 30 pairs 0 IMPs for their result. Some just benefit from the fact that they where at the same side as some "unfortunate" pair the others suffer from being on the other side. I prefer to get / loose IMPs for skill and not for luck in seating.

CrossIMPs create a IMP difference where no difference should be. Assume a board where 4♠ (420) was made 15 times and 1 table made 6♠-2(100). Assume you defended 4♠ so your score is: Those who played 4♠ have produce 14 times a score of 0. One time you loose 620 => 12 IMPs because your virtual teammates lost. So you loose 0.8 CrossIMPs against your table opps for making the best possible play your side can make. (Side note: MP scoring produces the same artificial difference!) While calculating Butler style: The best and the worst result gets eliminated and the average score is used as reference. In the example case the reference score is 420. You and your table opps get 0 IMPs for playing 4♠= as it should be. So basicly: CrossIMPs create artificial CrossIMP differences between pairs at the same table, awarding/punishing you for sitting on the same/opposite side with an "unfortunate" pair. Over a few hundred boards that might even out, but over a few boards it usually won't. So whenever one score is dominant by far, Butler scoring (eliminating enough noise) is superior.

Unfortunately, this cookie identifies your eyeballs on any site you visit and that uses the same adserver. This way they learn which webpages you visit and get a good profile about what you are interested in. Of cause this is only to better select the ads that you are really interested in. If they had your real life address they could sell this profile, so that only those advertising letters reach you, that you are really interested in. If you should happen to enter your personal data on a page with ads on it, there is no technical problem that is keeping them from learning who you are. Of cause they could ask a client, if you bought something there, who you really are.

Just saw DJNeill already reported that! Error Report: When scrolling to the registered pairs of a tourney the upper players profile is partially covered by the lower one. The upper profile does not start on top more like next to the 4the registered pair. I have not seen this before today. I'm using the updated 4.9.1 Version. I see this extra space at the partnership desk too now.

You don't want to play NT with this hand and you want to bid at least to the full game. The simplest way to do that is opening 2♣. Without better agreements partner will answer 2♦ and you can show your strong 1-suited hand bidding 3♦ now. You will have plenty of time to get information about distribution and controls from partner.