JmBrPotter

The ACBLmerge program estimates a "field strength" as the geometric mean of the ACBL MP holdings of the competitors. If you believe that, in some meaningful way, players with more ACBL MPs are "stronger" than players with fewer ACBL MPs; then this measures field strength in some sense. The larger the geometric mean, the more likely you will stumble across an opponent with more ACBL MPs than that mean. When the number of ACBL members in the field constitute a very small fraction, "nothing" is probably a fair estimate of what it means.

After more than five years, you probably either have a solution or have given up. Nonetheless, Kaplan and Sheinwold's How to Play Winning Bridge still shows up in used book stores and on eBay from time to time. My hard cover copy of the 1958 edition purports to be signed by both authors on the front fly leaf. I also have the 1963 edition in soft cover.

Thanks for the tip. I do not use any browser extensions, but I do have Safari's builtin spell checker enabled. I'll try disabling spell checking during my next few BBO sessions to see if that helps. Even if losing spell checking fixes #2 on my "It would be nice if" list, that still leaves #1 and #3 open.

My MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018) has been at MacOS 11.2.3 (20D91) with Safari Version 14.0.3 (16610.4.3.1.7) for a couple of weeks, now. I login and connect just fine. The only problem I have is one that persists from MacOS 10.14 or older. I realize this fact is neither help nor comfort for you . . .

I, perhaps incorrectly, understood that European practice kept the bidding cards on the table during the play of the hand. Perhaps, I got it wrong or this is no longer the case.

Partner and I use unusual methods. Check our card under JmBrPotter, my BBO ID. We have frequent alert obligations. My practice is to click the ALERT button before clicking on the last button of my call. After I complete my call, immediately after my call appears inside the round cornered red box, I click on the call and immediately begin typing my explanation. Often, my explanation disappears either while I'm typing it or immediately after/while I click on OK (or press the "Return" key on my keyboard). It seems that sometimes this event correlates with opponents clicking on my call to ask for an explanation. Other times, it is just a mystery. Wednesday night (12 May), I alerted a 3♦ opening and followed my usual procedure. My explanation, "Preemptive. Always missing one or more of ♦AKQ," got erased TWICE. I gave up and made the alert in chat after the opponents never saw the alert and asked about it in chat. This has been persistent for some months, now. It frustrates my opponents and me. It also delays our games. It would be nice if (1) invoking the "explanation" box automatically put the cursor in the "ready to type an explanation" position (It doesn't, now.), (2) the evaporating explanation text bug would go away, and (3) a longer explanation text were allowed (at minimum, up to about twice as long as now). I'm using the browser client version of BBO from a MacBook Pro running MacOS 11.2.3 (20D91) with Safari 14.0.3 (16610.4.3.1.7). If you do any special Microsoft encouraged things to "optimize" for Internet Explorer, I suspect that there is a chance that those nonstandard bits may be breaking other browsers. Such behavior would be consistent with historic Microsoft practices.

The double is fine. Your hand is good enough to compete for the partscore. However, partner lacks three spades with enough high card strength for a competitive 2♠ call over 2♥. The 2♥ bidder is behind you. Unless West holds ♥AKQJxx for the overcall, West is a favorite to hold ♦K and ♣Q. That leaves you with 2-3 minor suit losers and 1-2 likely trump losers. You will be fortunate to make 3♠ (or a no longer available 3♣). With your nearly certain three minor suit defensive winners, your prospects defending an adverse 4♥ contract are quite good. North’s possible four-card heart holding may include a winner or complicate West’s declarer play so as to create a fourth side suit defensive winner. Any action over partner’s 3♠ is nearly certain to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I vote for offering Fred Gitelman sufficient resources to expedite the keyboard short cuts in the web-based BBO client. Where do I send my donation? Until that happens, those of you with mousing/trackpadding problems should investigate the Kensington Expert Mouse Wired Trackball K64325. In my experience, there is no better pointing device available from from any manufacturer (including Kensington) at any price. It works on pretty much any version of either Windows or MacOS that you can imagine and provides the smoothest, fastest, most accurate, most precise pointer movement of any pointing device I've ever used. The scroll ring lets you scroll without messing with the pointer and scroll bars. The four buttons give you a total of six "clicks" without holding down any modifier keys. Meanings for all six "clicks" are customizable (but one must be plain, ordinary click with no modifiers) to do whatever you like (including different click definitions by application if such complexity blows up your bell bottoms). The trackball also offers excellent ergonomics. It cured my repetitive stress injury caused by mousing around. It might do the same for you. End of testimonial cum recommendation.

The original suggestion sounds like a good idea to me.

Possum, To a statistician, "randomness" means something like, "The statistical properties of an observation are indistinguishable from the statistical properties of a random sampling (e.g., tosses of fair coins, rolls of fair dice, or clicks from a Geiger counter) with a distribution matching the claimed distribution of the afore mentioned observation." That definition probably sounds very precise and quite sensible. Yet, a statistics professor could probably speed a full semester long advanced graduate level course on the topic (and wish for a second semester). Donald E. Knuth devotes Chapter 3 (nearly 180 pages) of his The Art of Computer Programming to the topic of generating pseudo random variants and validating their "randomness" by that definition. It is a suitable text for a one semester undergraduate class on the topic and barely scratches the surface.

Dave, If the powers behind Big Deal say that BBO has a good hand generator, I strongly trust that BBO has a good hand generator. The authors behind that generator have excellent knowledge of both the math behind good generators and the statistics to validate them. That theory knowledge has excellent backing by good computer programming to turn the theory into practice. I have a very minor philosophical quibble with Big Deal. It samples the population of all possible bridge hands without replacement (Big Deal would deal every possible bridge hand exactly once before it repeated a hand (perhaps, a desirable property if you want to be certain that the hands for your tournament will have no duplicates). Philosophically, I feel that the sampling should be conducted with replacement (There is a tiny chance {several orders of magnitude larger than Planck's constant but still quite small} that a set of a few thousand hands for a large tournament would contain one or more duplicates.) The practical difference is that once in several human lifetimes we are very unlikely to see a headline about two identical hands at the same tournament versus never seeing two identical hands at the same tournament. That is, no practical difference. You may have built a "feel" for what "random" bridge hands should resemble from playing shuffle and play events (e.g., local club games, KO teams, and Swiss teams). To get genuinely random hands via shuffle and play, every hand would need to be shuffled seven or more times. How likely is that? What proportion of the hands will be shuffled one or two (at best three) times before dealing? Inadequate shuffling will skew the hand distribution towards deals with four balanced hands each with 8-12 HCP (e.g., lots of 3-2, 2-2, and 3-1 trump splits and way to few 4-0, 4-1, and 5-0 trump splits). Players who encounter randomly distributed hands when they leave the sheltered waters of their local shuffle and play club for the first time will have their instincts for how the cards should break thoroughly battered.

The ACBL began using Big Deal for the Winter NABC in 2016. Nicolas Hammond (author of the recent Detecting Cheating in Bridge) proved that feeding a suitable program boards 1, 2, & 3 of an ACBL generated board set would yield boards 4-36 in a short enough time for the result to be useful for cheating on most of the "solved" boards. He also delivered statistics indicating that some pairs might be using this "crack" (or one like it) to cheat at NABCs and Regionals. The ACBL (and EBU, and USBF, and WBF) finished switching to Big Deal by January 2017. Apparently, most folks with sufficient knowledge of bridge, national bridge organizations, cryptography, mathematics, and statistics (This skill cluster probably requires a team of several folks in most instances.) believe that with suitable communications security Big Deal is not subject to such a "crack."

With the working ♠ void, it seems to me that you are really off only two aces.

Michael, Nice work on the BBF Systems Index. I have another one for you. MoTown Minors: General Approach: - 1NT = 10-14 balanced (but a minimum of 7 3-2-1 points) - 1♣ 11-37; 1RF; any hand not covered by another opening * Balanced 19-22, 25-26, or 29-37 * 3-suited 11-14, 18-20, 24-26 * 1-suited or 2-suited with a natural, strong 2♥ opening as in Goren 1950 * 11-15 minor suit 1-suited * 2-suited 11-15 with a 5-card major and an unspecified 4-card minor * 2-suited in minors but too strong for a 2NT opening - 1♦ 15-34; 1RF; any hand not covered by another opening * Balanced 15-18, 23-24, or 27-28 * 3-suited 15-17, 21-23, or 27-34 * 1-suited or 2-suited with a natural, strong 2♠ opening as in Goren 1950 * 16-(bad)20 minor suit one-suited * 1-suited with a natural, strong 2♣ or 2♦ opening as in Goren 1950 * 2-suited 16-20 with a 5-card major and an unspecified 4-card minor - 1♥/1♠: 11-20, Natural 4+ card major suit; 1-suited (6+ cards in opened major rebid opened major) or 2-suited (will rebid other suit 5+ cards) - 2♣, 2♦, 2♥, 2♠: Natural weak-two bids - 2NT: 11-15 minor suit 5-5 or more 2-suited - 3♣, 3♦, 3♥, 3♠: Natural, preemptive - 3NT: ANY solid 7-card suit (♥ and ♠ possible) without a side suit entry - Suit Higher: Preempt or partnership agreement - 4NT: Blackwood Responses & Rebids over 1♣ - 1♦ response waiting - 1NT response 10-14 bal - 2NT response 15-16 bal - 3NT response 17-18 4-3-3-3 - 1♥/1♠ response balanced too strong for 2NT or 3NT - 2-suit: 3-8 Natural 6-card suit HCP concentrated in bid suit - 3-suit: 3-8 Natural 7-card suit HCP concentrated in bid suit - Opener becomes captain except over waiting bid - Opener's rebids over 1♦ - 1♥: Nat, strong 2♥ opener - 1♠: 3-suiter or 29+ bal - 1NT: 19-22 bal - 2♣/2♦ 11-15 Nat, 1-suited - 2♥/2♠ 11-15 Nat 5 cards in rebid M w/ 4+ in either m - 2NT: 25-26 bal - 3♣ 16-20 minors 2-suited - 3♦ 21+ minors 2-suited Responses & Rebids over 1♦ - 1♥ response waiting - 1NT response 10-14 bal - 2NT response 15-16 bal - 3NT response 17-18 4-3-3-3 - 1♥/1♠ response balanced too strong for 2NT or 3NT - 2-suit: 3-8 Natural 6-card suit HCP concentrated in bid suit - 3-suit: 3-8 Natural 7-card suit HCP concentrated in bid suit - Opener becomes captain except over waiting bid - Opener's rebids over 1♥ - 1♠: Nat, strong 2♠ opener - 1NT: 15-18 bal - 2♣: 3-suiter or 27-28 bal - 2♦ 1-suited strong 2 opening in either ♣ or ♣ - 2♥/2♠ 16-20 Nat 5 cards in rebid M w/ 4+ in either m - 2NT: 23-24 bal - 3♣/3♦ 16-20 Nat 1-suited Subsequent responses and rebids tend be to be natural along approach forcing, 2/1 GF, or fast arrival lines. Use your current defensive bidding and preemption methods. :-) Brian

I've developed a dealing machine file verify and translate utility. The current version accepts two input files, verifies them to determine whether they represent the same board set, and, when there is a third file and the board sets match, reformats the inputs to create an output file in the specified format. Now, the supported formats are as follows: *.ALL: DEAL305 format ( rw ) *.BRE: Autodealer format ( rw ) *.BRI: Duplimate format ( rw ) *.CSV: Comma Separated Values text format ( rw ) *.DGE: Duplimate format ( rw ) *.DLM: Duplimate for Windows format ( r ) *.DUP: Duplimate format ( rw ) *.HRF: Duplimate Hand Record Format ( rw ) *.HDM: Hand Dealer for Macintosh ( r ) *.PBN: Portable Bridge Notation format ( rw ) *.RBN: Richard's Bridge Notation format ( rw ) Any help with adding *.LIN, *.GIB, or other interesting formats would be appreciated. The intended objective focuses on dealing machine operations. Given two files for the same event and session, the utility can verify them against one another---potentially helpful if there is some confusion about the correct file to use for dealing the boards. Also of occasional helpfulness, possessed of a dealing machine file in a format alien to one's dealing machine, this utility may provide a reformatted file for the same board set in a form acceptable to the dealing machine. Thanks,