hotShot

Dear JLOGIC, JLOL, PhantomSac and joeyc, LOL Lurpoa, BridgMORON, go away, Slave2BWS I would have thought that wining an international title gives someone reputation and that forum points are .... well ... junk. http://www.bridgebas...ner-competition http://www.bridgebas...ish-rebid-after Edited after reading JLOGIC post #114.

Seems you are leaving the 'Beginner' space, so I suggest you look into 'Minorwood'. Using 4m to ask about aces and trump Q, makes it easier to stop in 5m. And remember asking about aces is to avoid bidding a slam, if 2 keycards are missing, you only use it after you decided to try a slam. Using it to investigate the slam chances is an abuse.

I don't know if using several of your identities to downvote a spammer/troll is a good way to get the problem solved. http://www.bridgebas...__1#entry509324 #1, #5, #7, #9 (,#11) ...... Reputation given ../../public/style_images/BridgeBase_Ehren_v1/delete.png JLOGIC ../../public/style_images/BridgeBase_Ehren_v1/delete.png hanp ../../public/style_images/BridgeBase_Ehren_v1/delete.png JLOL ../../public/style_images/BridgeBase_Ehren_v1/delete.png PhantomSac ../../public/style_images/BridgeBase_Ehren_v1/delete.png joeyc

1) Yes, because partner has 16+ and could be unbalanced 2) pass, because partner will often have 15 and has a balanced hand

Just to get it right: A party lead by president A (called party a) started wars, ruined the state finances and left country in a messy state with an economic crisis going on. So a new president let 's call him B is elected, and his party has a small majority , but they can hardly act freely because of wars that are going on and because the government is short of money. President A had 8 years to mess things up and since president B did not clean that mess up within 2 years, at the "intermediate" elections some followers of president B lose their parliament seats. Now president B is blocked by party A, because he does not have a majority any more. Is the next step the election of a president c supported by party A, to mess up things even more?

While I basically agree with you, I suggest you check your private pension plans, because your insurance or bank could hold (or held and sold them with a big loss) a significant amount of Greek loans. A lot of people who don't care about the Greek now, will be surprised when they retire how big the impact to their pensions is....

Some people made an effort to visualize the papers published on AGW. IT gives an impression on how important the septics are compared to the scientific commutiny. Just move the slider. Number of Articles on AGW

Obviously people have a lot of reasons to vote and even more important people have a different understanding what a post's reputation should be. If many upvotes of a post mean that it's content is a valuable read for someone interested in bridge, while many downvotes suggest it's bad advice, what's wrong if I have an opinion about the votes in correlation with the post? There are a lot of "above average" posts, that I usually won't upvote as outstanding, that in my view should not have a negative reputation. There are also posts "below average", that I usually won't downvote as bad advice, that I don't want to be seen as recommendation just because they have a positive reputation. Usually people post a problem on this forum, because they had a problem, what does downvoting an opening post mean? - ignore this thread - don't ask stupid questions - RTFM I don't think that this is a good way to welcome people to the forum and to keep them inside this community. The number of posters that deliberately posted nonsense has always been very small and most of these kind of posts have moved to the water cooler.

When only upvotes were possible, I upvoted some rare posts that I thought stand out. If someone expresses his opinion, tries to state arguments and avoids personal attacks, than I think that post is ok, even if I disagree with the poster. When I see that such a post was downvoted for apparently no reason, I get this "Even if I think you are wrong, I'll support your right to state your opinion without being punished!" feeling. Votes should mean something, but a lot of the voting I have seen, does not meet such a standard. If people downvote for "a long intrest list", "bad english" or "wrong forum" the downvotes mean next to nothing and the only thing you can do about that is upvote such posts and and make the upvotes and the whole voting system meaningless.

IIRC the French 2/1 promise a rebid, As for the British (Acol) 2/1, I think they use stuff like New Minor forcing and 3rd/4th suit forcing.

Just a wild guess, but it could be, since many Web-Server generate non-standard HTML/Javascript Code for the Internet Explorer, that IE9 now follows the standard and does not understand the IE6-8 non-standard Code any more. Since the forum software is older than IE9 It might not be aware of that fact that IE9 can understand standard now.

Without agreements I would take it as competitive(+) with 4♥ and it is forcing to 3♠. It shows additional distributional values and should help partner to reevaluate his hand. But my view may be biased by the fact that our 1-level openings are limited.

Actually they were not. If you change your password on half a dozen systems every week, you need to learn 6 passwords every week. After a few weeks you will start to mix them up or you will start to invent some systemic change. e.g. use the same password, with the number of the week in the end or you will violate rule 4 and write them down. So rules 1 and 2 force you to violate rules 3 and 4. Does changing the password help? No really. Assume it takes 7 days to try all possible passwords, and assume that you change the password at the end of day 1. If your password was hacked at day 1, the damage was already done. If it was not hacked, than changing the password has a 6 to 1 chance that the new password is still in the set that hast to be tested. So changing the password will not slow down that hack in 6/7 of the cases. Obviously changing the password will help more if it happens at the end of the 7 day period. If your password is created in a way that it takes much longer than 7 days to hack you will hardly ever benefit from the change. But ... if you change your system settings in a way that only on login try is allowed in 15 minutes, hacking an insecure 4 digit password will on average take 5000 times 15 minutes which is about 21 hours. Allowing one try every millisecond will allow the hack to be done in about 1.25 seconds. So if these guys where really aware of security, they would have allowed you to pick a long password that you can remember and implemented a slow login retry. This would allow you to follow rules 1,3 and 4. As to rule 4, if you write down your password and put the paper with the password into a locked drawer of your desk. It can usually only be accessed by someone who is allowed to enter your office. If your office is inside an access restricted area, the risk from writing down your passwords is very small. In fact if you are able to use a password that is longer and more complicated, by writing it down the fact that it is more difficult to hack can over compensate for the small risk of writing it down.

Everybody should have equal rights to vote. Every other choice is hardly in a democratic spirit. If controversial views are excluded how do you plan to improve? If someone is wrong you should take the time to explain why (s)he is wrong, so that (s)he can improve or ignore it. Of cause voting can be abused, but where should we draw the line? Isn't it also abuse when "friends" always upvote each other? Isn't it abuse if "fans" downvote anybody who has a different opinion that their "idol"? If this up- and down-vote thing helps us to get rid of those "lol" and "Agree with ..." posts, it's an improvement. This forum reputation is mainly a popularity measure and not directly correlated with the bridge skills. (But of cause championship winners are popular and have great bridge skills.) Downvoting is new, people play around with the feature now, things will calm down in a few days.

If you use Firefox, it can display the stored passwords for you.

Bridge judgment means that you "have an idea" or even "know" what you could do with the cards in your hand. That is why the judgment comes with good declarer play. So you need to play as declarer a lot, but it is useless if you don't analyze what you have done. If you are a beginner and play with beginners you will often find, that you have reached the same number of tricks as the good players. But you need to realize that this does not mean, that you played well, it just means that your opps returned every gift you gave them. So if you want to benefit from playing a lot, you need good opps, that will take advantage of every mistake you make or a good teacher who can explain to you what you did wrong. If you don't have good opps available, in real life allow your opps to look into each others cards. If you have a software available, that can show you step by step which of your moves would have given away a trick, use it to analyze your play. Once your declarer play improves your judgment will follow and you will find, that when you understand what the declarer is about to do, your defense will have improved as well.

We had 40 people with laptops surfing the internet, exchanging photos and other files using a simple WLAN 8 years ago. I can't imagine that a modern wireless router should have trouble with 20 connections. Usually the internal speed of a router is relevant, but this can't be a problem if everybody is playing on BBO. The average datarate for a BBO conection is about 0.5 kb/second. 20 BBO -connections will need about 10 kb / second. But the WebCam will need some bandwidth, so you might have a problem with the upload speed if you only have a 1Mbit ADSL, but 2Mbit should be save. You might get problems with simultanious logins, because the BBO-Webinterface software might be updated. on all 20 laptops simultaneously So you should make the players log in early.

Need a little help from your friends?

I don't like the 100 posts limit. Why shouldn't a forum newbie be allowed to upvote a good response to his first ever post? The only reward you get for answering to B/I or support threads is a good reputation (either by remembering your posts or by votes).

I wonder if we should upvote for Bridge reasons......, but than why should we.

Don't focus to much on bidding, the most important thing to improve is declarer play. With good declarer play, you get all the tricks you can. This will help your judgment and your defense will improve once you understand what the declarer is doing. After that you can start thinking about bidding.. Your problem will be that everyone will want to teach you about bidding, because that is much easier than teaching declarer play.

Perhaps some of you are not aware that the german government and agreed with the nuclear industry in the year 2000 to shut down the power plants within the next 20-25 years. Merkel's government changed that end of last year, just before the first plants would have been shut down. Merkel's decision now is going a little further than what had already been planed and prepared during the last 10 years.

I would allow 4♠, white against red this seems the only logical choice. If partner intended to dbl 4♥, that would imply that there is a chance that 4♥ will go down. This would make the 4♠ a mistake, as you will go down while opps won't make their game.

Back in my Acol days this was not forcing, but maybe that was the stone age.

I think it would be a good idea to award people who won a world championship with some sort of icon. Perhaps their star could be golden while others have a silver star. Juniors could get a bronze star for their achievements.